


static line

by arbitrarily



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Anal Sex, Canon Era, Canon-Typical Content, Friends With Benefits To Lovers, Implied/Referenced Past Relationships, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Oral Sex, Period-Typical Homophobia, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Post-War, Threesome - F/M/M, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-13
Updated: 2020-05-28
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:48:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 39,955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24165376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: There was a version of this story that ended with George returning to something better than he had left. That was called optimism, which was a damn stupid thing to bring with you into a foxhole.
Relationships: Joseph Liebgott/George Luz
Comments: 13
Kudos: 51





	1. Bastogne

**Author's Note:**

> It only took me two weeks of lockdown to decide to rewatch this series and it took a far less amount of time to suddenly get hit with the idea for all of _this_ (in part thanks to me, staring with head tilted at [this gif set](https://widespindriftgaze.tumblr.com/post/75115116004) for far too long only to eventually walk away with what can be best described as that one meme with the bear where he's all "it's going to get weird, I'm going to make this weird" rare pair energy in bulk.)
> 
> This is based entirely on the miniseries and the actors' portrayals and characterizations of these men. I did reread the book the series is based on (namely to try to keep dates and places and history straight in my head), and did some cursory research so I wasn't talking completely out of my ass while writing this, but all that said: the timeline of events here is hardly exact and meanders from both canon and/or reality. The same absolutely applies for historical accuracy, particularly where the military is concerned, as well as the post-war situations for the characters. 
> 
> And, if you're interested, here are the two songs that got a whole lot of play during the writing of this: Car Seat Headrest's ["Life Worth Missing"](https://youtu.be/IKQ09dij4E0), and The Strokes' ["Ode to the Mets"](https://youtu.be/LNq4xox99HY).
> 
> This starts in Bastogne (like I was going to resist the opportunity for Foxhole Fic™) and goes through several years post-war. Additional tags and content warnings will be added as needed. The remaining chapters are all written, though need a generous amount of editing, and I hope to finish by month's end. Thanks for reading!

I think you knew  
Before the war began  
What loving to run towards something can do to a man   
  
"Life Worth Missing," CAR SEAT HEADREST

The hero, trying to unhitch his parachute,  
stumbles over me. It is our last embrace.

And yet  
  
“In Memory of My Feelings,” FRANK O’HARA

* * *

When he had thought about war, he never thought about snow. That was before, back at Camp Toccoa. There, even when the nights cooled and sweat chilled clammy on tired limbs, when he thought ahead, when he thought about what came next, he failed to consider the seasons. Now, that seemed a fairly large oversight.

George gathered his coat tighter around his body. He shook with cold and something worse. 

It had finally stopped snowing when he took to his foxhole that night. He knew that was as temporary as the current reprieve from the Kraut barrage, but, hell, you took what you could get. These were long days and longer nights, the still quiet of the Ardennes all too frequently interrupted by artillery blast and the panicked cry for a medic. He was alone, and what he couldn’t get was sleep to distract him. He eyed the edge of his foxhole in the gloom, the tarp overhead rustling in the wind, letting in the light of the moon reflected off the snow. He tried in vain not to think of earlier that day. The dud that landed right there before him and Lip as they cowered in a half-dug hole, Skip and Penkala nowhere near as lucky. Luck, that was all it was. Living on slot machine odds, but he wasn’t going to think about that. He was freezing his ass off out here and he tried not to think of much of anything. Nothing but how he hated the cold, hated the snow, hated Lieutenant Dike. 

Sudden brightness broke his reverie, or lack thereof, as someone dropped down beside him—dark again as they quickly pulled the cover back over. Liebgott. You learned to recognize each other, beyond the face. Everyone was just a helmet, rendered anonymous. He knew it was Liebgott the same way he woulda known it was Perconte or Malarkey who slipped right in. Skip or Penkala. Joe Toye. Buck. He kept waiting to feel sad, but it was like even that got lost out here. He felt nothing, a deadened hollowness, same as any of the felled and struck trees that were littered around them. 

Liebgott’s shoulder jostled against his. His helmet was cold where it bumped against the side of George’s face. He tilted his head away from him, let Liebgott rearrange himself, all bony elbows and knees. He slipped his helmet off, mussed his hair, exhaled in a cloud of condensation. “Fuck, it’s freezing.” He rubbed his head again and then pulled his helmet back on.

“Yup.” The cigarette barely moved in George’s mouth. Liebgott folded his arms over his chest, his body slouched low but still pressed up against George’s side. George glanced over at him, only to find him looking up at him, both expectantly and with the kind of scrutiny usually reserved for the enemy tree line. Goddamnit. He thought of Lip, earlier that evening, his face creased with unvoiced concern. He must’ve fucking sent him. 

George went back to staring straight ahead at nothing. The other side of the foxhole, crumbling earth and dirty snow. He smoked his cigarette down to his fingertips in silence. The faint burn felt better than it had any right to.

“I’m fine, you know.” He said it as he dropped the butt down to join the sparse graveyard of its fellow fallen comrades. He was rationing; he still smoked like a chimney. A man had to find his pleasure somewhere, he figured, even out here. Especially out here. 

“Yeah, ‘course you are.” Liebgott shrugged. He felt it instead of saw it, made George’s own shoulder mimic the action with the force of his. “Thought I'd do the neighborly thing, drop by.”

George slipped another cigarette between his lips. “Borrow a cup of sugar?”

“Something like that.”

Liebgott cupped his hands to block the flame from both the wind that found its way down to them and from the dark. George inhaled, leaned back. 

He didn’t sleep, but neither did Liebgott. They sat up all night in a silence not exactly companionable but shared all the same. George chain-smoked until dawn, fingertips pleasantly singed. Every now and again, Liebgott would take the cigarette from George’s mouth. His fingers were dry and cold when they brushed against his lips. He’d steal a drag, then return the cigarette to George’s mouth. It never crossed George’s mind to offer him his own to smoke.

Shit was bad. No optimistic wiggle room around that one. Morale was a resource as vital as rations and ammo and cold-weather gear, and considering it was the only one they had in abundance, it had begun to bow under the strain. George was fairly certain it was Lip alone holding this entire company up by sheer force of will. Get the man a medal. 

George held his cup out for his daily spoonful of slop. Looked especially thin and unappetizing today. He stood off to the side by himself, leaned against a tree far enough back from the line it still stood tall rather than jagged and broken, like a man chopped off at the knees. Like—

Never mind.

His eyes quickly scanned over the other men gathered and eating. He could barely look at Malarkey without feeling a twinge of something that felt uncomfortably a lot like guilt in the midst of all that miserable sympathy. Earlier, he’d given him the crucifix he dug out of Skip and Penk’s foxhole, found he didn’t have anything to say beyond, “I’m real sorry, Malark.” Neither felt like nearly enough. He slurped the chow down. There was no point in looking back. No point looking to the future neither. When he was in the ground, his world limited to the hole he’d dug, he tried not to look forward. Tried not to think of himself walking out of here, as if the thought alone could serve as a dooming jinx. If there was a better end to be had, like hell he was gonna chase that away. All you had to look at was the present, shitty as it currently was. 

He watched Babe fumble with his spoon, his fingers frozen. Heard the quiet curse when he dropped it down into the snow, a splatter of watery brown stew seeping into the snow. 

He turned away. It was very cold and George missed everyone.

Liebgott came by George’s foxhole again that night. Just as the night before, they sat together in silence, only this time the quiet was brittle. Fragile. Liebgott was the one to break it.

“Stop doing that,” he snapped. It was almost a relief, in truth. He knew Liebgott best like this—firing off at the mouth. Either sniping at each other over something impossibly stupid and irrelevant, or mid-detente, forces joined as they mercilessly razzed some poor unsuspecting third party. 

“Doing what?” George used the same tone of voice; they were going with the first option. 

“That thing, that thing you’re doing with your mouth.”

“What thing with my mouth?” His own tone had tipped towards indignant outrage, which, frankly, he’d assumed Liebgott had exclusive rights to use. 

“You do this thing, where your mouth, it goes all squiggly-like, when you’re feeling squirrelly, or what-have-you.” Liebgott was trying to imitate him—that, or he was having a stroke. All it did was bring attention to his mouth, which was decidedly not squiggly. Just thick-lipped, another quality unlike George’s own.

“I don’t got a thing with my mouth. And I’m not squirrelly.”

“You’re doing it right now!” George glared into the pause that stretched between them, his teeth clenched in an effort to keep his mouth straight. “You only do it when you’re scared.” Liebgott threw it out there, that same casual, pointed way as when he tried to goad someone into a fight. It was kinda working. 

George exhaled, stifled the start of a bitter laugh. What the fuck did he think he was he talking about. “So I’m scared now?”

“You’d have to be a fucking knucklehead not to be.”

“Well.”

“Yeah.” Liebgott made some sort of gesture towards him, too difficult to see clearly in the dark. “Come on. You’re making me nervous, is all.”

“ _I’m_ making you nervous? You came to my party. You’re in my foxhole, pal.” He started to laugh in full now, a hard, derisive edge to it. Muffled it in the name of noise discipline. “Sure, sure, it’s not the Krauts a holler away, about to most like start raining holy hell down on us, as they do, every goddamn day and every goddamn night. No, right, my apologies, it’s George Luz, striking fear into the heart of every G.I. Joseph from here to Tokyo.”

“Shut up.”

“When else?”

“What?”

“When else you seen me…do that thing I don’t do?”

A huff of laughter came from Liebgott; George could see the condensation of it hang in the air. “Christ, I don’t know. You little shit, you’re not scared half as often as you should be.” He went quiet, as if considering the past two years that had brought them here. “Before Normandy, before we took off. When we were in, uh, where was it—Carentan, when we were there, you got a look at Tipper, I saw you.” He went quiet again, rubbed at the stubble grown in along his jaw. “I don’t know when else, I don’t remember.”

George didn’t remember either. Or, he didn’t want to remember. “I’ll try to keep my mouth in check.”

“Like you could.”

“What're you even doing here?” he said, exasperated now.

“It’s cold,” Liebgott said, like that was any kind of answer. He didn’t say anything more, so George didn’t either. 

The problem, he wasn’t gonna say, was that sitting here felt a lot like waiting to die. Worse still, it gave you too much idle time to keep company with your miseries and your worst thoughts, try as you might to keep them away. He was fast collecting a great many of those, and for a typically happy guy such as himself, he didn’t know what to do with them.

It was just—he couldn’t shake it. And it felt wrong that out of everything he’d seen these past couple days—and he’d seen a lot, too much—it was Buck, without his helmet and without his rifle, walking off the line that did him in. It felt too much like defeat. He kept coming back to it, poking it like a bruise. Making sure it still hurt. 

Some of that hurt must've shown because Liebgott sighed heavily. “Alright. What’s eating you?” George didn't answer for a good while. Wasn’t even sure that he would. He didn’t want to talk about it.

“I don’t wanna,” and he shook his head. It came out anyway. “I couldn’t get him to stay.” He said it cold and empty as the woods that surrounded them. Insanely, he wanted to laugh; it sounded like something Peggy Lee would sing, all sad and beautiful and very far from here— _I couldn’t get him to stay_. Christ. 

“What?” Liebgott said after a beat. "Who?"

“Buck. I couldn’t—I tried, and.”

And what? He had tried. George had followed him, begged him even. Nothing doing. He couldn't reach him. That was before Skip and Penkala. That was when the snow was still bright with both Toye’s and Guarnere’s blood, bright in a way that still surprised George each time it was spilled. Even dark and arterial, there was a brightness to a man’s blood, and never more so than when spread across the snow. Even the smell of it was sharper in the cold—a metallic, butcher shop stink. He was sick of it. He didn’t want to think about any of that. He didn't want to think that maybe he needed Buck here. That he couldn’t handle losing anyone else, even as he knew that was what was most like to happen next. Soon they would attack Foy, and with Dike behind the wheel, only further loss could be expected.

“He was gone, George.” There was a kindness in Liebgott’s voice he’d really only ever heard directed at other people. People at their worst, people with their guts hanging out and Doc trying to mash them back in. Was George one of those guys now? Did Liebgott look at him and see his guts falling out of him? A dead man walking? George wrapped his arms tighter around himself and tried to think of something funny to say. Nothing came. There was nothing out here. He swallowed around the knot in his throat and for once he said nothing.

“I don’t like you like this.”

George snorted. Liebgott said it like he’d gone and personally offended him. “Well. How’d you like those to be your last words to me, huh? Wouldn’t like that none either, I bet.” George almost sounded like his usual self, but he wasn’t completely oblivious. He’d noticed how his own humor had begun to corrode more than a little out here in the cold. Go ugly. That was an ugly thing to say.

“See, that’s the kind of shit I’m talking about, smart-ass.” Liebgott cupped his hands near his mouth, tried to seek out some warmth. He blocked the majority of his face from George’s view. Not, he told himself, that it mattered. “Ain’t gonna bring anybody back,” he said from behind his hands. “Just gonna make you and the rest of us more miserable than we already are.”

He wasn’t wrong.

He met Buck when he won five dollars off him in a craps game heavily tilted in George’s favor. When he met him—really met him, met him proper, as Buck and not an officer—he caught out the same thing in him that lived inside himself: they weren’t above cheating. Not at cards or at darts or any other recreation these boys called sport. These boys could turn anything into a game, and George liked to win. No malice to it, just competition.

That night in England they all knew Buck as an officer, but he still sat down with them. It was George and Perconte, Skinny and Christenson and Liebgott, and Buck had said, “So, boys, what're the stakes?” There was no standing on ceremony with Buck, that much was clear. George was the one to start the smack talk between them, at first against each other, him versus Buck, and then naturally, as if they had made an agreement even before Buck had sidled up to their game, they turned on the others. George walked away with the haul, pockets full. Buck had slugged him just below his shoulder, hard enough that George felt it, and he grinned. George smiled back; that was the only thing you could do in the face of a face like that. 

“This is gonna be fun, huh?” Buck said. And yeah, maybe for a good spell there it was. 

Buck had teased him later, about all the guff he’d gotten from Winters about gambling with them. At the time, Buck had a dart in his hand, a bullseye waiting before him. George had a pack of smokes waiting on the outcome of that throw. 

“Well, then, Lieutenant, might as well make it worth your while. What d’ya say we raise those stakes?” George said, mouth sly. Buck had liked that. Buck had liked him.

People liked George. Most people. Not Sobel; he found out punishingly fast his charm had no effect whatsoever on Captain Sobel.

“There may be idiots out there who find your schtick amusing, Private Luz, but rest assured, I am not one of them.” Sobel had said that to him, early on at Camp Toccoa. George had tried to sweet talk his way out of latrine duty, probably, or whatever accusation against his capacity to be a soldier in Sobel’s unit had been levied his way. Both, most like. 

He had watched him walk away. Skip, in earshot the entire time, came over with a quick spreading shit-eating grin. George turned to him. “So, was he saying he’s an idiot, or what?”

“You seen Foxhole Norman around?”

George looked up to find Liebgott standing over him. Snow fell gently and landed on George’s upturned face. He mimed an exaggerated yawn. Liebgott snorted. Shivered.

“Nah. Probably got one of the replacements trying to tunnel his way out under the Channel.” He belatedly remembered what Lip had said about talking shit about their CO, then shrugged it off. Figured wasn’t like Dike had any ground to gain with Liebgott anyway: Liebgott wore his disdain with pride. 

Liebgott kicked the heel of his boot against the frozen earth. “Best of luck with that.”

He looked out into the distance, past George and past the Bois Jacques, into Foy, and then jumped down beside him. 

“Need more sugar?”

“What?” The word caught breathless in Liebgott’s mouth as he tried to get comfortable alongside him. A wasted effort, George wanted to say. 

“Nothing, neighbor. Come on in. Pull up a chair. Give me a minute and I’ll see what we got in the liquor cabinet.”

“There he is. Here I was thinking I was gonna have to dig more than just a foxhole out in these woods, bury your sense of humor.”

“That’s really funny, Lieb. I’m proud of you. But that’s where you’re wrong, buddy. You can bury the man but not the spirit.” George paused, considering. “I think that was what the nuns used to say.” He looked over at Liebgott. “You didn’t have to suffer the nuns growing up, did you?”

“I did not have the nuns.”

“Lucky bastard.”

They sat together in silence for a small while. George swiped at his nose with the back of his hand. His nose was numb and cold enough he wasn’t entirely sure if he’d notice if it fell right off. His toes had gone numb, too. He barely even registered how damp his socks were and knew that was nothing but bad news. With a long-suffering, weight-of-the-world sigh and a groan, he leaned over. He started pulling at his bootlaces. Frozen, of course, the knot too tight. “Goddamn,” he muttered. He pulled harder, his elbow digging into Liebgott’s outer thigh. Liebgott fidgeted, his leg bumping against George’s. He was close enough that George could feel when he took a deep breath in. 

“You remember when we were at Fort Benning? After we got our wings?” George stilled; he didn’t say anything. Liebgott took that as an invitation to continue, his voice still pitched unnaturally quiet. Much like himself, George had only ever really known Liebgott as loud. He had a voice that carried, often in outrage or disbelief, but over the last three nights he had spoken to him quietly, as if sharing more than just a secret. “It was the next day,” he was saying now, “and we'd drank so goddamn much that night—”

“Now that, I do recall. That hangover haunts me to this very day.” George yanked on his laces impatiently, knowing it'd do nothing but tighten them that much more. 

“Yeah, well, remember Penk? He was completely bushed after morning drill, and we had a few minutes before chow time, so he’s racked out, asleep immediately, and you thought it’d be a swell idea to tie his jump boots together. But Sobel came calling, _at attention_ , so Penk leapt up, and—”

“Timber,” George called, low and hushed, his mouth twitching. 

That got a low chuckle out of Liebgott. “Hell, even Sobel didn’t know what to do. Closest I ever saw that sonabitch come to cracking a smile.”

With his head still bowed over his boots and his face out of view, he smiled. George knew what Liebgott was doing. They didn’t have to only remember the bad things—there was still plenty of good to pick from. “He was gonna be the first man to enter the war with his hands and feet tied behind his back.”

“Fucking Houdini.” That was what they called Penkala for awhile, until something new overshadowed the joke and they forgot to keep making it. Penk was good-natured through it all though. Hell, he laughed the hardest out of all of them. 

“For Christ’s sake, here, lemme help you.” Liebgott bent down. His cold fingers knocked George’s out of the way. He let him. Liebgott leaned lower and his chin brushed George’s kneecap as he worked, the weight of his arms holding his legs still. 

This made for the third night now that he’d spent with Liebgott. The first he’d assumed was nothing more than an obvious gesture of comfort the only way Liebgott knew how to give it. Now, he wasn’t so sure. It wasn’t like Liebgott was any kind of a stranger to him. The opposite, in fact. They were as close as any other Toccoa man, they just never really sought each other out. Until now, George supposed.

The laces came loose. “There,” Liebgott said. He settled back, his arm still slung over George’s leg. 

Liebgott was a skinny guy, but propped up beside him, he felt more substantial than he had any right to. He could feel the twitch of Liebgott's muscles against the cold and the stillness and against his own; as if on cue, his thigh jumped against George’s. Liebgott was a coiled spring, either mid-advance or here, in the dead of night, waiting for artillery fire they knew would find them eventually. While George’s situational awareness had never been more fine-tuned, somewhere in these woods he had lost a certain awareness of himself. His own body. He’d gone numb to it. His feet burned sometimes and hurt when he tried to move his toes in his boots. His entire body felt like one tight clenched muscle he knew he was never gonna relax. Pain radiated constantly in his lower back from lugging around the radio pack on patrol. His fingers cracked and bled in the snow, in the grooves between his fingers, skin split along his palm, constantly reopening when he grabbed for the butt of his rifle. All of those aches felt very far away, as if they belonged to someone else’s body. Or they usually did. Right now, in a hole in the frozen ground with Liebgott beside him, they all came into starker relief. He knew all the parts of himself that hurt. Or maybe it was simply his body he had become aware of again. The parts of himself that touched and were warmed by Liebgott—he was aware of that. He was very aware of that. 

“Yeah,” George said. “Thanks.”

“Now, the Duke, he says, ‘Imagine finding you here.’ And Marlene, she bats her eyes,” and George did the same. He dropped his voice low and raspy and not particularly feminine. “And she says, ‘I’m the type of girl you’re liable to find anywhere.’”

This was called making an effort. Putting up a better front. This was George giving a one-man show of that one John Wayne film Lip never did get to see the rest of, performed over chow time. He made up the lines when he couldn’t remember them, his impression of the Duke sliding wide into something clownish and intentionally dumb, his Marlene scarcely recognizable. Made everyone laugh though, and that was the point. Made him laugh too, and that was good. That was better. And if he still felt like there was something rotten living inside of him, that was fine, too. No one else had to see that. No one else could. Well, George thought. Except, maybe. Among the men gathered was Liebgott. His head was bowed as he shoveled down watery stew quickly, lest it, like everything else out here, went cold. Maybe at night George could let the parts of him worn through show—but only when they were packed in tight, side-by-side. No witness but each other, in the dark and in the cold.

George cleared his throat, sore in a way he just knew was gonna give him grief down the line. He sat perched on a felled tree trunk, the guys humoring him as much as he liked to think he was humoring them. He grinned wide. “So, now, the next scene,” he said, and he continued.

When Liebgott didn’t come by that night—and following a half-hearted attempt at catching some shut eye he knew wasn’t going to come either—George went looking for him. He found Liebgott up, watching the line. He shared a foxhole with Alley, who took George’s arrival as an opportunity to take a piss, see Doc about something or other. “Watch the line, or, watch Liebgott watch the line,” he said.

George saluted Moe's departing back as he slumped down next to Liebgott. He slid his rifle into place, ready to shoot if need be. 

“Any action?”

“Nope. Must’ve worn themselves out earlier.”

George offered a soft noise of agreement. They’d spent the late afternoon into the evening under a heavy barrage of Kraut artillery that just would not let up. George had cowered alongside Perconte in his foxhole, waiting beneath the patchy coverage provided by downed tree limbs for either annihilation or grace. After, George had to endure Perco whining about all the dirt and splinters and pine needles he had caught in his hair, as well as his suspicions Doc had made off with his comb.

“What’s wrong with Moe? He go to Lulu’s with Guarnere?”

Liebgott snorted. “Nah, it’s his feet. Dumbass doesn’t listen, doesn’t change his fucking socks. Can’t tell you how many times I remind him.”

“Ah. The ol’ trench foot strikes again.”

Liebgott spared a glance at George. “So, what? You miss me that much you came crawling up to the line to visit?”

“I walked, I didn’t crawl. I crouched.” He paused. “And it wasn’t you I missed so much as your noisy wheezing, you fucking mouthbreather. Puts me right to sleep. That, and your bad conversational skills.” None of that was true, or at least not fully. But you didn’t come right out and say something so stripped bare as, _I don’t know what to do with myself alone and in the dark, so here I am. Do something with me_. The truth of it was that Liebgott was more than good enough company for George. They’d bitch and they'd complain, they'd smoke, guzzle down coffee with both the consistency and taste of motor oil when they were lucky enough to have some. Bitch some more. It was easy to doze off beside him mid-sentence only to wake and resume the conversation twenty minutes later. Maybe Liebgott was the first thing in these woods to feel easy and right, but that wasn’t anything you said either. 

“Yeah, fuck you too, George,” Liebgott said, as pleasantly as he ever said anything. George grinned. He stared out ahead, tried not to think of words like _desolation_ or _purgatory_. “Say,” Liebgott was saying, "I saw Perconte scurrying around earlier—said he was looking for Doc, too. He get hit?”

George started to laugh. “Nothing so dramatic, though way he was acting, you wouldn’t be wrong for thinking so. Some shit of his went missing from his pack, he was looking for Doc for answers.”

“What? Doc’s company detective now?”

“Sure, why not.” It was far easier than explaining the actual story.

Both Liebgott’s face and his voice had gone wistful. “Wouldn’t that be something, y’know? The Parachuting Detective. I’d read the hell out of that shit.” He looked over at George quickly before he returned his attention or at least his eyesight to the line. “I was reading this one story, y’know, before we left.” He started talking then, about this detective serial. A whole lot of murder and more than a little fraud, fake identities, dames and intrigue. Liebgott was more than a decent storyteller and clearly had one hell of a long memory. He told George the whole gist of it—unraveling the plot, occasionally doubling-back for important details he forgot to mention. George got into it. He kept interrupting him to do voices, repeat dialogue, add his own. Liebgott started teeing him up, pausing where he knew George couldn’t help himself but try to impersonate a Brooklyn gangster or a gun moll with an appetite for both petty larceny and arsenic. They kept at it for a good while, voices hushed, rifles poised in front of them.

“And then what happened?” George said when Liebgott went quiet. He nudged him when he didn’t answer immediately.

“Don’t know. We shipped out before I got to read the newest issue.”

“What the fuck.” Christ, but didn't that feel like a fucking lifetime ago. The train ride north, the harbor in New York, the _Samaria._ The long stretches of anxious boredom as they crossed the Atlantic. He tipped his head back. With Liebgott looking straight ahead, there wasn’t much of his face he could see. A bit of his cheek, his jaw, a pale strip of neck that dipped down into the collar of his jacket and the knotted wool scarf at his throat. The rest of him was in shadow. “It’s gotta be Sylvia though, right? She’s got that life insurance paperwork.”

“Yeah, see, that’s what I thought too, but you know how these stories work. It’s never the one you think it is who done it.” No arguing with that logic. They drifted into a mutual silence, both occupying their own thoughts or lack thereof. 

George breathed into his hands. His stomach growled and he sighed. “You know, there’s not a crime I wouldn’t commit for a perfectly cooked steak right now.”

“Yeah. Fuck.”

“All the fixings, too. Get me a baked potato, butter, salt, sour cream. Hell, get me two.”

“You’re killing me, Luz.”

“Chocolate cake for dessert. Ice cream. Anything but those fucking lentils.” He glanced over at Liebgott. Found he was already looking at him, his gaze sidelong, attention split between him and the line. “What else we eating?”

Liebgott took a considering pause. His mouth went crooked, his face sharp, as he started to grin. “I say we get ourselves a nice broad, drape her right over the table, naked, legs spread—”

“Oh my god,” George laughed. He moaned, performative and just barely quiet enough. “Now you’re killing me, Lieb.”

Neither said anything more. They turned their attention back to the line. The quiet prickled now, uncomfortable—the freighted kind that preceded violence. Interruption. No peace to it. George lifted his eyes to the sky even though there was nothing to see. 

“You know what _lieb_ means in German?” Liebgott’s voice was low, barely audible. George’s head was still tilted back, looking up. A brief frown sketched over his face at the sudden subject change and then was gone. He dropped his head, eyed first the tree line and then Liebgott, his face lost in profile under his helmet. 

“That I do not. Lemme guess: a pain in my ass?”

Liebgott laughed, the sound breathless. Like anything else out here, it hurt. “Yeah. Exactly that.”

Patrol that afternoon went about as well as it ever did out here, which was to say only one casualty, no dead. 

George still had blood caked under his fingernails; he’d left the small bit of soap he had in his possession rust-colored as he tried in vain to get clean. He’d done what he could, tried to pack down the wound before Doc could reach them. A replacement, and with his face contorted in both fear and pain he was completely unrecognizable to him. The kid was lucky enough he took the hit to the shoulder, no higher or lower. Not fatal. George absently picked at his nails, stopped when he realized that was fresh blood welling along his thumb—his own. 

He dropped his hands down at his sides. Dark was coming on soon and fast, and with it a sharp plummet in morale. A handful of the guys were huddled together, speaking in the same low tones, a hum of nervous energy, anxiety barely concealed. He knew exactly what they’d be talking about as he approached, and sure enough, he was right: the upcoming assault on Foy. No one trusted Dike. Fuck, no one could even find Dike most of the time. 

Trying to do right by Lip, George took it upon himself to be the voice of reassurance. Keep spirits afloat, or at least not drowning. They might have Dike, but they also still had their noncoms. “You think Johnny or Lip’s gonna let anything happen to us, huh?”

“Shit, I’d even take Lieutenant Peacock over Dike,” Perconte piped up, as if George hadn’t even spoken. 

George shook his head. “Nuh-uh. No dice.” They weren’t the ones who had to try to steer Lieutenant fucking Peacock in the right direction, the very last thing George wanted to worry about mid-assault. “That asshole’d march us straight through the Brandenburg Gate and ask if we were in Paris yet.”

“At least we’d be alive to march,” Perco grumbled. “At least we’d make it to Berlin.”

Beside him, Garcia hugged himself, miserably cold. He perked up now. “You think they’re really gonna let us jump into Berlin?” The number of times Garcia had asked the question, George was assuming it was this, even more than the pay, that must’ve been the selling point for him joining the Airborne.

“That’s real cute,” Liebgott said, his mouth wry. George got a good look at him for the first time that day. He looked fucking beat to hell, more exhausted than he usually did when he joined George at night. Dark circles were bruised purple under his eyes, made all the more noticeable by how pale and drawn he was. Caution was writ obvious across Garcia’s face now, the same that matched each step forward through the crunching snow mid-patrol. When Liebgott’s mouth cracked open, it was all teeth. “You think we’re getting outta here alive.”

George crossed his arms over his chest, his shoulders bunched up to his ears. He tried to mute the worry unfolding in him. The recognition, because that was what it was. He was looking at a goddamn role reversal. As if George had managed to drag himself back from the brink, but somewhere in there, they’d swapped places. It was Liebgott on the edge now. A flicker of guilt lit inside him; he should’ve seen this coming. Too busy trying to get his own head right to take stock of the man who helped drag him out.

“Come on, Lieb. Talk like that—just gonna make everyone miserable,” he said, cheerful and bright, parroting back Liebgott’s own words to him. He watched it register over his face. His eyes narrowed and his mouth went tight. He looked more like himself now, the instinct to fight back springing to life and raring to go. He didn’t chase it, didn’t say anything more, but it was there. That was better.

The snow came down heavy that night. Made it difficult to see past the edge of their foxhole as thick flakes dripped wet down the back of his jacket. God, he hated this fucking place. The occasional burst of MG fire broke through the dense snow, the glint of it dulled, as if some far-off beacon in a dream. In the dream, maybe, they were lost at sea. That was what George was thinking about, his eyes heavy and tired but still open. He felt Liebgott shiver against him, their bodies curled into each other and Liebgott’s hand curled in the blanket wrapped tight around the both of them. Without meaning to, George shifted closer into him.

“You okay?” he heard himself ask, rusty with sleep he’d yet to claim. Like that too might’ve come from a dream. Liebgott wasn’t chatty tonight. He’d barely said much of anything, opted to let George fill the silence with a whole lot of noisy nothing. He’d stopped talking what could’ve been five minutes or over an hour ago, and now—wasn’t that just like George: rather than try to find a way to politely skirt around the big hole in the middle of the earth or the hole in another person’s heart, he stepped right in it. 

Liebgott didn’t answer him, not immediately anyway. George didn’t say anything either, just watched the snow. Thought some more about the sea and marooned ships and wondered if he’d joined the Navy what kind of mess he’d’ve gotten himself into instead. Pirates, he hoped. He was on the point of saying something to that effect when Liebgott spoke. 

“You really think we get out of here?”

George breathed in deeply; the air was so cold and damp it hurt. The cold left him feeling clumsy and stupid, slow to move and slower to react. None of those were things you wanted in combat, but, hey, it was literally all they got. 

He also knew what Liebgott was asking wasn’t anything you brought into combat either. You didn’t say shit like that, not out loud. There wasn’t any heaviness to the question though. He’d tossed it off casually, the same way George was pretty sure that Liebgott had asked him in the past what he was thinking of doing with his weekend pass or if he had any extra smokes to spare, if he’d heard the shit Hashey’d got himself in with Johnny. Casual, but in earnest. 

“Yeah,” George lied, because that was what you did. There was no other answer. 

The sky lit up slowly, as if curling back a curtain, to reveal a flare arching overhead as it exploded. Still couldn’t see for shit through the snow, even when it was lit like this. He could see Liebgott though, his jaw trembling as his teeth chattered, nose red, face white. They were so close to each other it was difficult to focus on his face. He was just parts instead of a man. 

“We’ll get out of here,” George said. His mouth began to tilt up. He could feel the raised ridge of Liebgott’s knuckles against his own chest. “Then they’ll send us some place worse.”

The light from the flare began to dim, darkness descending again, same with the snow. Liebgott started laughing, only for it to slip into a wracking cough. For lack of anything better to do or say, George joined him.

“You know, you didn’t have to send Liebgott to come mother hen me.”

He said it to Lip well into the following morning. He’d been thinking it from the first Liebgott had dropped in on him. Now, if anything but especially based on his recent behavior, maybe someone should’ve been sent to keep an eye on him. He’d caught Lip distracted, his hands full managing about eight different tasks, like a short order cook and the kitchen was on fire. He was currently on the hunt for Dike, only to be waylaid by first George and then Doc with some paltry supplies from the most recent drop. George trailed after him as they tromped though the snow. 

“What?” Lip finally said.

“I said, you didn’t got to send Lieb,” and then he stopped, both talking and walking. Lip had stopped too, and George had all but walked straight into him. Lip stood with his body half-turned towards George, his expression nothing short of confused. 

“Send Liebgott where?”

George felt something slacken in his jaw as awareness settled over him, from the crown of his head on down. He felt like a detective Liebgott might read about, after he’s discovered the linchpin of a clue or a motive or, fuck, maybe the killer himself, and somehow all fingers pointed back at himself. Because like one of those guys, he was starting to get the picture here. He felt oddly embarrassed, a real rarity, and he couldn’t decide who for exactly. It was like he’d gotten a glimpse of something he was never supposed to see, too tender and raw. 

“Never mind,” he said quickly. George chuckled, grinned, tried to stop his teeth from chattering with the cold as his jaw tensed again. “Just goofing.”

“What else is new. Here, come on. Gimme a hand with this.”

He had dozed off. He opened his eyes to a dark and bitterly cold night, felt it to the bone. The scratch healing on George’s face itched. He shoved his hands up tighter under his arms, in an effort to both keep warm and to keep himself from clawing at it. He could hear the tarp as it caught in the wind, the muffled sound of his own breathing. Liebgott’s. He felt each brush of his measured breath faintly against his ear. He must’ve dozed off, too.

George lay curled on his side, his left hip aching against the packed dirt. He vaguely remembered tipping over as his eyes grew heavier, as either Liebgott was telling him something or George was trying to tell him something before sleep interrupted. In moments like that, when sleeping and waking lost their rigid boundaries and began to bleed into each other, it didn’t so much matter who was doing the talking and who was doing the listening. It felt a little like they were the same person, connected in a way so bitterly hard-won you couldn’t defuse it even if you tried. George didn’t try; he fell asleep. 

Now, he had Liebgott more or less wrapped around him, those wiry limbs of his heavy like fallen debris, but warm—so incredibly warm. He didn’t get how Lieb could be that warm while George was so cold. But maybe George felt that way to him, too. Maybe it was never yourself alone that could keep you warm enough; you needed another body. That body’s weight was pressed near entirely on him, from shoulder down to his legs. Liebgott’s knee rested over his, his legs bracketed around George’s own. It was Liebgott’s chest to his back, his fingers curled into the sleeve of George’s jacket above the elbow. The cradle of his hips pressed into him. George closed his eyes again. He told himself just for a little while longer, and he shifted back into Liebgott’s warmth. He realized it then. He could feel it, feel Liebgott, George’s ass now flush against his groin—he was hard. George’s eyes were open now. The steady rhythm of his breathing broke as he took a sharp breath in. It happened. That was one thing George told himself. Nothing doing, completely normal. That was another. To be fair, George really was in possession of a really very nice ass—the third—and, _I should probably definitely absolutely fucking move_ , the final thing he told himself. 

George remained very still. Liebgott was awake too, he could tell by how he was breathing. That was something he knew about Joe now: what he sounded like when he was sleeping, what he sounded like when he was awake. What his body felt like against his in either state, an intimacy impermissible in any other potential avenue of life save for this one. Liebgott must have tipped his head down: each exhale warmed against the nape of George’s neck now. It made George shiver, and for once it wasn’t because of the cold. Liebgott’s breath came in too quick succession for him to be asleep, same with the tension of his body. George could feel the muscle of his thigh alongside his own, primed as if ready to leap away. Did he know George was awake too? Was that why he waited? Because that was what it felt like he was doing—he was waiting. He was waiting to see what George would do.

George waited, too. Their breathing filled the covered foxhole, sharp and over-loud. Suddenly, Liebgott’s hand tightened on George’s sleeve; he could feel the imprint of his fingertips as he squeezed George’s arm, digging into his flesh. As if he was clinging to him, holding him in place. George felt something akin to shame at the thought of Liebgott earlier— _you really think we get out of here?—_ that maybe all this time he’d needed something too and it had never occurred to George. He hadn’t seen it. The shame only added to all that existential exhaustion he carried with him, that he thought of as having accrued since leaving Mourmelon, even if it probably existed before then. That awful loneliness that threatened same as a Kraut advance, grief like a gaping wound in his gut that kept sucking up everything vital in him. It didn’t really matter which was the deciding factor, if there even was one. George rolled over. There would be plenty of things they would each take back home, should they be lucky enough to get there, and there’d be even more they would pretend weren’t coming with them. He assumed this would be one of those. 

Joe’s eyes were open, he could see that much in the dark gloom. Moonlight shone bright off the snow, light breaking through where the tarp lifted off the ground, flapped in the wind. Let him see him—the gleam of his eyes, the set of his mouth. George didn’t pull back from him. He instead pressed himself to him, front to front, his thigh slotted between Joe’s. He rested his head on his shoulder. Joe didn’t have near as much of a beard grown in as some of the other guys, as much as George, but the stubble still scratched at his cheek where it brushed against his jaw. He didn’t know what he was doing, which was a lie. He knew. He just didn’t want to take responsibility for it. He tucked his head, his mouth nearly brushing at Joe’s throat, his breathing a lot more ragged now. Joe’s body twisted, the movement small, hesitant, a word he never thought he’d apply to him, as if they both were scouting each other, wary of any hair-trigger they might trip. George could feel Joe’s prick again now, tucked to the left and pressed against the cut of George’s hip. George was going fucking bony out here in the woods, nothing to eat but a grim cup of chow, and he felt painfully aware of it now. He was just as aware of Joe’s own scrawniness, that skinny body braced to his. Like if they tried hard enough they could break each other open, break through skin, on each other’s bones. 

Joe reached and his hand fastened at the base of George’s skull, his grip just that much too tight, but that was good. He felt that. George’s eyes watered from the cold, and he couldn’t see Joe’s face, not with his own tucked into his neck. They both were dirty as all hell, but there was a comforting familiarity in the smell of him—sweat, skin, wet wool, stale cigarette smoke, the cold earth they were currently buried in. Joe’s breath hitched as he rocked his hips forward into George’s, hesitation giving way to something as damning as intent. George wasn’t entirely sure what he had hoped to achieve here, but he felt a spark lodge in the center of his spine and radiate outward. Made his body feel like it was buzzing, awake and alive. He felt a stirring of his own cock between them, and fuck, how long had it been? Couldn’t even jerk off properly out here, too goddamn cold. He muffled a groan against Joe’s throat, chapped lips accidentally finding warm skin. Joe made a faint noise that sounded a bit like choking, so George let it happen again. He felt a pull at his hair as Joe’s hand lifted to find better purchase. He pulled harder, made George’s whole body jerk, cock at attention now. He didn’t know what he wanted, he just knew this felt good. He lifted his leg, clumsy and heavy. The sole of his boot scraped against the raw earth wall of the foxhole and he wrapped his leg around Joe’s hip, drawing him in even closer. George was nearly underneath him now, the leverage that much better for Joe to work himself against him. 

And he did. Their chests were pressed together and Joe’s mouth rested humid and open at George’s temple as he rutted against him. Everything seemed entirely too loud to George—the rasp of their clothing, layer upon layer somehow simultaneously too much and still not enough, and their own heavy panting breath. He could hear the click in Joe’s throat as he swallowed, faint little sounds that kept catching and made George squirm under him. George was mercifully quiet—the impossible made real. He tried to remember what he was like with the girls he’d fucked, and he found he couldn’t recall. Couldn’t think of a single face, couldn’t conjure a name. Couldn’t bring himself out of this foxhole. He could barely even remember what he did to them, beyond the obvious. Did he talk while he fucked them? He assumed he did; he talked any other time, why would he stop just because he was getting his dick wet? He wasn’t talking now though. He felt both distinctly afraid and also, for once, as if he had removed himself entirely from the scene. Gone from this nightmare. He forgot the girls without faces or names completely and he forgot what waited should be raise his head above the surface. It was only him and Joe. Their bodies. He focused on that. The discomforts—the cold ground, Joe’s knee against the meat of his thigh, the cruel grip in his hair, the rank animal nature of it—only heightened the pleasure, a crack like the kickback of a rifle as Joe bore down on him, ground against him, and George realized he was already on the cusp of coming. It was unexpected, his stomach muscles clenched, cock leaking from the friction against Joe’s inner thigh, and he groaned again, lips cracked and mouth dry. He was completely beneath Joe now, pinned down, their bodies contorted to fit the foxhole. His hand clutched tight around Joe’s upper arm, his other hand pressed to the center of his back, his arm looped around him, holding him to him. It was difficult to move beneath him, so beyond the involuntary lift of his hips, each pushed back down by Joe, he didn’t try. He took what was given to him. He groaned again as the pressure built near to untenable. 

“Shut the fuck up,” Joe hissed, his voice unsteady but so stupidly familiar. It was the familiarity that got him, almost as much as the pressure against his prick. 

“Lieb,” he said, far too much shit packed into a single syllable. He didn’t think that was fair his voice would betray him like that. All he got for it was Joe pulling his hair that much harder, drawing George’s entire body taut and on edge, nearly there. He bit down on the filthy shoulder of Joe’s jacket when he came. A dumb as fuck idea, if ever there was one. He dimly thought about cleaning his dungarees, dreaded dealing with it, but the thought was distant, belonged to a future version of himself that was as much a stranger as any past self before Normandy. It wasn’t the same person laid here, trying to catch his breath as Joe lost his own. He shuddered against him, and George watched him through half-lidded eyes, his arms still wrapped around him. He rubbed Joe’s back through it, not out of any real intent but because he was there. 

It took him longer than he thought it would for Liebgott to lift himself off of him. He finally rolled to his side and sat up, knees bent, his arms draped over them. Head bowed. He cast the occasional sidelong glance in George’s direction. With a heavy sigh, George propped himself up on his elbows. It was that much colder without his weight on him. George sat up too, legs and shoulder bumping against Liebgott’s, and he reached for his cigarettes. Eyed the three left. Fuck it. He lit two in his mouth and passed one off to Liebgott without comment. His hands shook only a little. 

They smoked together in silence. George’s back felt damp with sweat, cooling too quickly, uncomfortably. A laugh broke abruptly from his mouth. He shook his head, tucked his chin and continued to laugh quietly.

“What?” Liebgott snapped. George tipped his head back, his laughter petering out. Liebgott was glaring at him, his cheeks flushed pink.

“Was it good for you too, sweetheart?” George said. He thought he was aiming for Humphrey Bogart; he landed somewhere sillier and farther afield. Nervous, even. Didn’t matter. Liebgott’s mouth still pulled into a scowl, and with an odd feeling in the pit of his stomach, George knew he shouldn’t look at Liebgott’s mouth. Not unless—

“Would you shut the fuck up?” Liebgott said. Much like George, he missed the mark with his tone. George knew him: he wanted something defensive and ugly. What he gave instead was warm with humor, and, maybe, more than a little affection. 

George lifted his hand to his mouth, withdrew his cigarette. “Yeah, yeah,” he said. "Shutting up now.”

You took care of each other, that was all it was.

George remembered when they were in Holland, after the action at the crossroads. He arrived back at battalion CP around the same time as a few of the guys, Liebgott included. George was cross-eyed with exhaustion, nearly stumbling over his own boots, ready to drop. He hoisted the radio pack off with a little less care than he usually employed and set it down. His shoulders and his upper back alternated between numb and bruised, his lower black tight as a curled fist. His neck was stiff; he whined, turned it into a whole noisy production as he tried to crack it. 

“Jesus, would you pipe down over there?” The sneer was audible in Liebgott’s voice, and it was that—the suspicion his mouth would be curled down, surly as anything—that got George’s attention. He lifted his head, winced at the ache then went all faux-innocent. Because sure enough, there that mouth was. 

“Oh, am I bothering you?” Even when he tried to keep his voice flat, deadpan and sarcastic, he couldn’t keep that bright spark of humor away. George talked like he had a twinkle in his eye—Welsh had told him that once, back when they were in Normandy. “How am I supposed to take a man like that serious?” Welsh had said that too, mostly teasing. Probably. 

Now, George stared down Liebgott. And if you wanted to talk about flat, there it was. Despite the obvious temper heating up his face, there was a lifeless, beaten look to him. He had the same exhaustion they all had carved blue-black under his eyes. George’s eyes narrowed: Lieb was still bleeding. The fresh blood stood out starkly against the crusted-over brown stained into the bandage and his jacket at the neck. The bandage was clumsily done, slipped down and baring a good portion of a messy wound. He must’ve wrapped that up quickly, when he came in with Alley. Speaking of, he was gonna have to ask around to see how that poor son of a bitch was doing.

George approached him. He poked at the bandage, south of the cracked dried blood and the raw fresh spill. Liebgott had a long neck, skinny. Be perfect to wring, and the temptation had definitely arisen for at least two-thirds of the members of Easy Company. Liebgott hissed. He swatted at George’s hand. Maybe more like three-fourths. 

“Gonna get that looked at?”

“It’s fine.”

George took a step back, resumed unpacking his gear. “You should get that looked at.” He was sure Winters had most like already told him the same, but Liebgott had that stubborn mule set to his face, like he was gonna defy anything, including good advice, just for the sake of it. Contrary for the hell of it. 

“I’m not going to no hospital.”

“Would you listen to that—now he’s dying, huh? I don’t see your guts, soldier. You ain’t going nowhere.” George rested his hands on his hips and his tone shifted, just a little. “You want me to call Doc on in here?” All he got for that was another scowl.

“You think I gotta?”

“Well, yeah, that’s what I been saying here. Look at you. You’re bleeding all over yourself.” George glanced down at his own hands on his rifle. He needed to clean it. Needed to clean his hands—dirt-caked and bleeding along the knuckles from who the fuck knew. He raised his head again. “You let that go, that’s how you get infection. That’s how a guy like you loses his head. Literally. And what the fuck are we gonna do with you when your head falls off? That’s a genuine question; I’d like an answer.”

“Jesus Christ, alright, alright, I’ll go find Doc.”

“In my unit, decapitation kills, son.” His impression of Sink came as naturally to him now as sleeping with his eyes open or taking a shit with eighty extra pounds of pack strapped to him. “Do not lose your goddamn head!”

Liebgott flicked him off as he walked out the door, grumbling under his breath. George chuckled to himself, watched him go. Sure, you took care. That was all it was, nothing more.

There wasn’t any time for it to be weird between him and Liebgott, though fuck knew he’d take the distraction from every other misery beset upon them in the Bois Jacques. Instead, they moved on Foy. And then, at long fucking last, they prepared to move out. 

George hitched himself up into the back of the truck. He took a seat. Told himself he wasn’t thinking about nothing, even though he most certainly was. A certain insanity was leant to war, made all the worse by how perfectly logical it was treated. Defended. This was probably something like that. That was what he told himself anyway.

It was just, he’d never done anything like that with a guy. Maybe came close, a million years ago, back in Aldbourne. Those late nights at the pub, Buck grinning down at him, his face effortlessly suggestive and George easily suggestible. Even then, it was like a joke, humor disguising any real intent, a tactic George knew well. Nothing would happen, and they both knew it. That made it safe. And, sure, he had maybe thought about it before, thought about guys like Toye and what exactly they could do to him and with him if they were willing and if that was how George’s courage could manifest, but the thoughts came without the understanding of what it was he wanted or what he was actually thinking about. Idle thoughts, always at a slant, an angle, so he’d never have any real ownership over them. No responsibility, no consequences. It was same as thinking of the dames in the pictures: it ain’t ever gonna happen, so no harm, no foul, in thinking it. 

He wondered now if the same could possibly apply when you did the thing you told yourself you never thought about with someone who had never stepped into that particular dark corner of your imagination. 

Because that was the thing. That was the funny—funny as in _what the fuck?,_ not funny _ha ha_ —business of it all: Liebgott was never one of the guys George thought about. He didn’t think he’d ever really paid Lieb any mind, not beyond the fact he was a fellow Toccoa man. He was a brother, an extension of himself the way every other man he’d come up with in Easy was to him. So, no, he hadn’t paid any attention to Liebgott, not really. Not until now. 

It was simpler, instead, to think of all the parts of himself that remained unchanged. He was still cold and still tired and always hungry. He slipped a cigarette between his lips and rummaged around in his jacket for his lighter. The truck pitched over the rutted road and his shoulder bumped against Lip’s. 

“That’s all, folks,” George said, his Porky Pig stutter near perfected. Lip laughed, the sound of it strained and bronchial. George went quiet. He squinted back at the way they came—Bastogne just another place they’d been that only some of them survived.


	2. Haguenau

The house stunk of mold and plaster dust, cordite and mud. Any attempt at quiet was interrupted by the persistent drone and drop of artillery, the intermittent patter of rifle fire. There were, technically, four mildewed walls and a bowing roof that surrounded them. George couldn’t imagine a finer place to spend a night. 

They had arrived in Haguenau earlier that day. George was finally able to shower, no greater luxury his imagination could conjure than water and soap. His hands were still cracked and dry, his hair still too long, but he felt a little less like a rat kicked into a sewer and left to drown. 

“How are the fellas doing?” Lip asked. He punctuated the question with a cough that shook his chest and made George wince in sympathy. That was him, about a week ago. No pneumonia, but a hacking cough fit to raise the dead if not the devil. He could barely smoke, which was, short of everything else bad and hideous and unendurable this war had delivered, the worst thing to happen to him. He kept at it until Doc snatched a cigarette from his mouth and snapped that he was only making it worse. 

“They’re good, Lip.” He draped a blanket over him, about all he could do to help get him settled in at CP. “Get some rest.”

“You’re not just saying that?”

Of course he was just saying that. George sighed, braced a hand on his hip. Rubbed at the beard grown in under his chin. “Come on, we’re all fried. We could all use a good night sleep in a warm bed with a hotter gal, under a solid roof free of mortar rounds and about a dozen other sweet comforts, but we’re here, and we’re not gonna get any of that, so why complain?”

“You love to complain,” Lip said. His smile was small and he had the blanket drawn up to his chin. For just a moment, George could imagine him as a very different man, the sort he probably was back home. Lip’s smile faltered, and they were back in the present. They were in France. “Everyone’s solid though?”

George frowned briefly before he shoved that away. He wondered who he meant. He must have somebody in mind to keep pressing like that. George quickly ran through the roster of the men, the ones he’d seen that day, spoken to, passed at the showers, who bugged him for any extra rations or boots or blankets. No one stood out. He couldn’t decide if that was a good thing.

George rapped his hand against the wall. It made a funny hollow sound. He prayed he wasn’t about to bring the roof—barely hanging on as it was—down on top of them. “As the house we’re sitting in, Sarge.”

Mid-afternoon, and he grabbed some grub with the boys of second platoon. Conversation was scattershot, all obligatory insults and some uninvested ribbing; that night’s planned patrol cast a long shadow over the table. George had first got word of it from Cobb, told with all the dismal glee of a pardoned man watching the rest of his comrades mount the steps to the gallows.

George peppered the conversation as he could with the occasional joke, but his heart wasn’t in it either. He knew these men’s moods as well as his own, and they were all on edge. Hell, since they'd stepped foot into Haguenau, they’d all been bickering with more teeth than usual. George glanced around the table, looking from one man to the next. Now that they were all clean, it really showed what their time in the Ardennes had done to them. Tired, pinched faces, pale, hollows dug in under eyes and cheekbones. Tension hummed among them, as if it would take very little for them all to be at each others’ throats. Sure enough, that suspicion was proven in due order.

“So you’re not in first platoon anymore?” Web said to him suddenly, breaking the strained quiet. Web pushed his chow around in his cup as if during his absence he had developed an appreciation for only the finer things in life, like hospital food.

“George here got promoted.” Liebgott said it with both pride and accusation, but then most things he said carried with them more than the faint charge of self-determined wrongdoing. 

“Where someone’s needed to shovel shit, ol’ Georgie’s up to the task,” he said, mouth full of the third worst stew he’d ever eaten in his life. 

“When you put enough dick in your mouth, you can climb any ladder, ain’t that right?” Cobb’s tone was mocking and cruel, and maybe it was on account of the lack of George’s immediate reaction—no joking, no laughter, no comment—but an uncomfortable, expectant silence descended around the table. It shouldn’t have been a big deal: Cobb always was an asshole, worse now more than ever. Web’s disdainful look across from him was almost enough to make George crack up. He remembered how Web could be, back at Toccoa—he hated it when they talked crass.

“You know, there are other words than _fuck_ ,” he’d say.

“Yeah?” George would reply. “What the fuck are they?”

Now though, Cobb. He couldn’t put his finger on what made the accusation, baseless and vulgar as any other shit they threw at each other by the hour, feel so wrong. So personally insulting. Maybe it was the fear that there was a bit of truth in it, that somehow Cobb could know that. Hell, that George himself was only figuring it out right now, the things that lived in the dark corner of his mind he deliberately kept unattended. It was different, he knew that much, from when he’d made a similar joke to Liebgott and Babe earlier that day. They’d stopped by CP, and Liebgott had whistled low, asked George how life in the big house was.

“Palatial, elegant. I don’t gotta look at any of your tired mugs.”

“Nah, just an officer’s ass.”

George had laughed. “Well, what else am I gonna kiss around here?”

He’d thought nothing of any of that, but now, with Cobb, it was like he’d snagged himself on a splinter, mean and deep. From Cobb it was ugly.

Liebgott scraped his spoon along the side of his cup. “Speaking of mouths,” he said, a soft threat of menace coiling around his words, "why don’t you shut yours, Cobb. Never done a goddamn thing worthwhile with it anyhow.”

“Unlike Luz?” And there it was again, something leading about his tone that George didn’t like. Didn’t trust.

He trusted even less the look that broke over Liebgott’s face. As if he was offended, taking what Cobb was saying as personal as George was. Or, no—worse, actually. Like he was embarrassed for George.

“You’re cute, Cobb. But flattery won’t get you everywhere,” George said, punctuated with a wink. The goal was good-natured but he belied it with a shit-eating smirk. It was his bid to diffuse the tension. War did a lot of funny things to a man, he knew, including make him into an asshole. George had seen that much. Fuck, it’d done funny things to him, too. He still liked to laugh, liked to make people laugh, but all too often it felt like the things he said, the things that made him laugh, had been dipped in tar first—pitch black and more than a little toxic. It more or less worked. Everyone went back to their near inedible chow; at least it was hot. 

“Luz is the luckiest man in all of Easy,” Carlson said to Web, like maybe he thought he was introducing them, who the fuck knew. These replacements—must’ve thought Web was one of his own. No, wait; the kid’s name was Carlton. Calderone. This marked the second time George had so much as heard the boy speak since he’d joined them after Noville. He’d catch his name eventually, if he ever did at all. He listened and groaned inwardly as the replacement (Caravello?) said, “Hell, he might even be the luckiest man in the entire 506. He never been hit the once!”

There was a clatter as Liebgott threw his spoon down onto the table. “Jesus Christ.” He pointed at the kid. “Take it back. I said, you fucking take that back right now, I swear to god.”

Awkwardness resumed at the table, worse than before. The poor kid stammered, said something like, “I didn’t mean nothing,” and beside him, Babe was saying, “It’s bad luck, is all,” real quiet to Web, though George wasn’t sure why Web needed anything explained to him, least of all by Babe or about Liebgott. Johnny shook his head and Cobb still looked more than vaguely murderous and Perconte kept shoveling down his stew, unfazed. Liebgott had gone quiet, though he fumed across the table, color high along his cheeks. 

George picked up Liebgott’s spoon. He looked across at him and found Lieb wouldn’t meet his eye. There was a funny feeling in him he didn’t know what to do with so he did nothing. He handed Liebgott back his spoon. He took it.

“Well, would you look at that, with friends like these.” George spread his arms out wide, a comically deranged grin spread across his face. “Look how lucky I am!” There was some scattered laughter—not his best effort—and then, mercifully, the conversation moved on.

George yawned wide enough his jaw cracked as he entered the house where the men were billeted. The relief of sitting out patrol versus the expectant dread of waiting for news—that was how he’d spent his night. It was over now, and he hoped to catch a couple hours of sleep before they had to do it all over again tomorrow. Today. Whichever.

He pulled off his helmet. Past the front door he could see into the gloomy former parlor of the house. The better part of the outer-facing wall was swollen with water damage and the broken windows, yet to be boarded up, let in all that cold night air. George hoped where he was to bunk upstairs was at the very least slightly warmer, though he doubted it. Despite the cold and the late hour, someone sat there by their lonesome, a smudged silhouette in shadow. Shattered glass crackled underfoot as George stepped deeper into the house. As he came closer, he saw that it was Liebgott sitting there, his head tipped forward, elbows braced on his thighs, body bent. George stilled.

He reached into his pocket as he approached. He tossed a Hershey bar at Liebgott. He reacted quickly, caught it. 

“Don’t say I never done nothing for you.”

“Thanks. Though,” and Liebgott shrugged, mouth sheepish. “Already grabbed myself one earlier.”

“Yeah, I figured as much. Thought I might be able to make you feel a little bad about it.” An unlit cigarette bobbed in his mouth as he spoke. 

George took a seat across from Liebgott on what remained of an end table. Liebgott didn’t open the chocolate bar, just rotated it in his hands, felt out the shape of it. “You hear about Jackson?”

“Yeah.” Who the fuck hadn’t heard about Jackson? George didn’t have anything more to say about it, so he didn’t. He lit his cigarette instead.

“Walked into his own grenade blast.” Liebgott shook his head. “What a fucking waste.”

“Yeah,” George said again, for lack of anything else. As of recent, he found himself more and more uncharacteristically at a loss for words. He supposed a man ran out of things to say about the same tragedies repeated with different men. But it was a waste, going out like that. There was a fragility to everything, now that they had left the Ardennes. Now that everyone could say shit about the war ending like they actually believed it and meant it. They each had to be careful, incredibly careful. The shore was closer now than it had ever been, but each step was on thinner ice. He couldn’t imagine fucking it up now, buying the farm this close to the end.

Liebgott’s face was shadowed in the lack of light. He was lit only by George’s cigarette and the distant glow of a fire burning maybe a block away. Smoke wafted in through all the gaping cracks in the house, the broken windows, along with the warm orange flicker of light. The condensation of their breath hung in the air along with the smoke. Liebgott was looking at him, George could see that much.

“Don’t you do anything that stupid, alright?”

George laughed. He couldn’t help himself. “Christ, not you too.”

“Not me too what?” Liebgott’s voice cracked, mad now; it was entirely too easy to push him in that direction.

“Buck. Don’t you remember him? Going foxhole to foxhole, giving out hell. ‘No silly business now, Georgie.’” His impression wasn’t exactly right, but it was close enough. Liebgott snorted. George’s mouth slackened; he looked down at his hands, dirty again. He flipped the lighter between his fingers, the metal worn smooth. George didn’t tell him the rest, what he was thinking of. The last time Buck had said that to him, George had replied, “Wouldn’t dream of it,” and Buck had said, “That’s what I like to hear.” He slapped the palm of his hand down on George’s helmet and gave it a shake. “What would I do without George Luz?” And then he was walking away, into the snow, and George hadn’t thought anything of it. Didn’t know what was coming, but then you never did.

George took a deep breath. He felt it in his lungs—the nicotine, the smoldering smoke and the cold, a residual tightness he wondered if he’d ever fully get rid of. He shrugged, tried to form his mouth into a smile that looked, if not felt, natural. “I’m always stupid though, thought you’d know that much about me by now.” When Liebgott smiled, he looked a lot younger. George wouldn’t ever dare call him soft—least of all to his face or within earshot—but a little of that usual edge was dulled, at least here, in the low light and the cold and the minute amount of privacy to be found at what felt like the edge of the known world. “But I do try, to be careful.” Liebgott’s mouth faltered and his face fell into something more serious. George couldn’t see more because he tucked his chin and all he had now was the top of his head. Liebgott dragged his hand through his hair and then lifted his head.

“Well, keep fucking trying.”

This marked the first time the two of them had been any kind of alone since that foxhole. It did nothing good to think about that, but like most things George didn’t want to think about, he couldn’t stop. It frightened him sometimes, how it felt as if it hadn’t even happened. That you could rearrange history like that and no one had to know but yourself. Liebgott was looking back at him now, his eyes dark and every bit about him, the shape of him, the weight of him, was painfully known and familiar. History, even. 

“Yeah? You too,” George said. He nodded towards the stairs. “Go to bed, Joe. All this’ll still be here in the morning.”

They continued to move east through France. They settled for the night in some frog town George couldn’t pronounce let alone remember. Dusk settled grim and gray around them. The sun had hidden behind cloud cover all day, making their descent into night a gradual thing, until they suddenly found themselves fast approaching full dark. 

The men were gathered together in a bombed-out barn taking advantage of the down time. Some of them picked at their rations, bitched about them, bitched about everything. Others cleaned and oiled their rifles; Tab pursued the futile task of trying to pry off weeks’ worth of mud accumulated along his boots with the edge of a knife. Babe must’ve been allergic to the damp and rotting hay—he kept sneezing. They gossiped. George always had the gossip, and now he had an audience.

“—so,” he was saying, "this Captain, over with 1st Battalion, Aiken or Eichel or some such, doesn’t matter. But this Captain So-and-So? He’s got this absolute stunner of a wife. Gorgeous beyond words, y’know, other than blonde and tits and hips. I seen photos. It defies logic how a fella like him—weighs one hundred twenty soaking wet, shorter than me, arms thinner than his rifle—landed a broad like that, but he did, and he was damn proud of it. This Captain Aiken-Eichel, he was always boasting about his babe waiting for him back home in Des Moines, or wherever, flashing those glamor shots of the old girl to any soldier who crossed his path with a functioning eyeball. Well, we pull into one of those early frog towns. I don’t remember which one, but Vest tells me he’s got a letter waiting for the good Captain. Captain opens the letter, and it’s from the beautiful Mrs. Aiken-Eichel of Des Moines, Iowa. She wanted to inform dear hubby of the good news—he’s a daddy now! Gave birth to a healthy baby boy—or maybe it was a baby girl, who can remember—just before the holidays. Now, Vest says, the poor Captain’s squinting down at that letter, counting on his fingers, doing the arithmetic. Finally, the poor sap lifts his head. ‘Say,’ he says, ‘how many months ago was July?’ And Vest tells him, seeing as, at the time, it’s January, “Six, sir.’ The Captain shakes his head. ‘No—how many months ago was July of 1943?’” George slapped his knee, laughing. 

“That’s an awful story,” Shifty said. “Just terrible.”

“It’s funny!” George said.

“You the daddy, George?” Tab teased.

“Yeah, Floyd. Hopped on my chartered jet, courtesy of Roosevelt himself, and took a brief pause from trying not to get my ass shot, and went and did the good missus a favor. And _then_ , get this: I came _back_.” He pulled a dramatically goofy mug and he got laughter for that, too. 

“The ol’ girl better in black-and-white than the living flesh, huh?” Ramirez said. “Rather risk it out here than in the bedroom?”

“False advertising, I bet. Worse than any Dear John letter,” Grant added, a wry shake of his head.

“Maybe Luz couldn’t get it up.” Christenson grinned wide, gave in to a laugh.

George held his hands over his heart. “You wound me, Pat. Also, I question if you understand where babies come from. Now, see, when a man and a woman—”

“Was this fella real pissed?” Popeye asked.

“Of course he was fucking pissed,” Liebgott said. “Who wouldn’t be pissed as all hell?”

Babe looked deep in thought. Babe got like that sometimes, real quiet and considering, which to George always seemed a bit of an unexpected personality shift. “Imagine that,” Babe finally said. He sneezed. “Don’t even got the thing you looked forward to going home to.”

He killed the fun, just like that. George could feel it all but sapping out of the ruined barn. Babe sneezed again. “Nah,” George said. He inhaled deeply off his cigarette. “He’s going back to two. I didn’t tell you the rest of it. Captain of the Immaculate Conception looked up at Vest, eyes bright as Christmas morning, grinning away. ‘What d’ya know? I didn’t think it worked like that.’”

The mood was saved; loud, raucous laughter erupted at the poor Captain’s misfortune. The jokes quickly turned from the miracle of life to the virgin replacement battalion had shipped in to join them a week ago. Poor kid was pimpled and barely looked a day over sixteen, his rifle wider than his skinny arms that looked like they could barely hold it up to sight let alone shoot. George would never admit it, but he had a hard time being around the kid. Had a hard time looking at him and thinking anything less than roadkill. George didn't know it, and how could he, but the kid would never make it out of France. A sniper’s bullet would find him roadside in little more than a week’s time, and there, he’d drop. 

You never knew what was coming. You knew that, and still, you kept going. For now though, they were still. It was twilight and George had a mostly full pack of Lucky Strikes and they were laughing.

“Luz! Luz!” The trucks’ engines grumbled to life, early morning and ready to move out, as mail call reached the bottom of the stack. George snatched the envelope shoved at him and lumbered up into the back of the waiting truck. He took a seat and eyed the envelope. Not from home, he could tell that much by the handwriting. Not his ma’s, and not his sisters’. Masculine, by the look of it. Ink was smeared in the upper left corner, where a return address would go. Looked like, from what he could still read, somewhere in England. A field hospital, maybe. He thought back to his own letters he’d posted via Vest, out to Toye and to Buck. The letters varied widely in content—to Joe it was all company gossip and plenty of off-color jokes, including one about a three-legged race he was awfully proud of. To Buck, hell, he didn’t even know what he wanted to say other than a friendly request for proof of life, confirmation that he was alive if not fine and he hadn’t gotten lost. No reply, as of yet. Not from Buck. 

Toye, on the other hand—George gingerly opened the envelope. He tried not to think about Joe as he saw him last. He failed, pictured him sprawled in the snow, face contorted in pain, Doc trying to stop the bleeding. All that blood. He shook his head, unfolded the letter quickly, his hands shaking only a little.

“Who’s that from?” Perconte asked. He leaned over beside him. The truck leapt into motion, picking up speed as they bumped over torn-up road, drove out through burnt-out farmland. 

“Your mother,” George said, distracted. Not his best effort.

“Yeah? She miss me?”

“Not in the slightest.” George tuned Perco out as he began to read, his mouth splitting into a grin. 

Joe hoped he was holding down the fort and giving the Krauts what for. Woulda left his brass knuckles, he wrote, but then wasn’t it always Joe Toye himself swooping in for the knockout punch in defense of Pee-Wee Luz and his big mouth in a fight? He wrote that he might’ve lost his leg, but not his arms nor his aim far as he could tell; he wanted a rematch, darts, and if either of them got anything worth gambling—like, say, George's left leg—he’d be happy to make a wager. 

_Take care of yourself, kid_.

George missed a lot of things. Home, clean clothes, a decent supper, a good night’s sleep. But what he found he especially missed, as new faces began to fill in the gaps left by the old and familiar, were those hot late summer nights in Georgia. To get specific—he missed those weekends they didn’t lose their weekend passes to Generalissimo Sobel. George needed more than two hands to count the number of times those nights ended in a fist fight, Easy Company either defending their honor or provoking whoever they could find equally dumb enough to want to square down. It was without fail always the same group of them, George and Toye and Liebgott and Guarnere, Skinny making time with his girl of the week in the corner, ready to jump in should it come to that. When you got down to it, they were all the same sort of asshole—always starting shit. Never knowing when to walk away.

George kept to the smack talk for the most part, not that he’d ever back down should a fist find its way to his face. But it was George who always pushed it that much too far, who tipped the scales over into full-on melee. With that big mouth of his, he set the stage. More often than not it was Liebgott who threw the first punch, just itching for a good fight. They all were. 

They all had their own way of throwing down. Toye was a full-on brawler, all brute strength and brass knuckles—unstoppable. Guarnere fought similar, his temper vicious, like a boiling tea kettle a beat away from screeching. Liebgott was scrappy and not above an unfair fight or a sucker punch, almost always out-classed by his opponent’s weight and strength, but that never seemed to faze him, least of all when he’d go for a hit below the belt. You could trust a guy like Toye to know when a fight was over, but with Liebgott, they always had to pull him off. He might've been a skinny guy, but that had never stopped him. He walked around like he was built like Bull.

And George, somehow both aware and oblivious of his stature and his limitations, would never back down. Sure, he’d try to talk his way out of it first, deescalate the very thing he’d escalated: “Look at this face. C’mon, look at this face. You really wanna go and hit this face?” In his experience, there were quite a few people who would, and he'd attempt to defend himself accordingly.

The war then was still far away. It existed across an ocean and in the corners of their minds, like a bad dream invented by a parent to keep a child in line. Each day, from before sun-up until well after sundown, Sobel barked at them about the Japs, about the Krauts, that it was certain death nipping at their heels. If they didn’t move any faster, that was it, curtains for them, he’d be writing to their families to let them know that they were too stupid, too slow and now they were very much so dead. “Do you want your mother to have to hear that her son is _dead_ , Private?”

“Better than keeping it a secret, I ‘spose,” George had muttered under his breath, crawling through pig guts beneath a line of barbed wire. 

That aggression had to go somewhere, and so it did. They’d fight with townies, with other infantrymen. Other companies in the Airborne, the ones who didn’t have to march twelve miles each Friday night, deadweight as they shuffled back to their bunks. They’d find them and they’d goad them until those smug grins sluiced off their faces, and then they kept pushing until the only place left to go was down.

Spring came to Europe. The cold had yet to abate entirely, least of all in the early morning and late at night, and while snow and ice had given way to frequent rain showers, there were also blue skies and sunshine. The company came to a halt as they yet another bright day fell into evening. They stopped at an abandoned and destroyed farm for the night as they made their way farther east. No skirmishes today, no engagement. It was fucking nice, was what it was. A guy could get used to it.

George hauled his pack off and glanced around into the developing sunset. Babe was already sprawled out on his back in the grass. Malarkey was saying something to him and looked just as ready to drop. Both the farm and the men were quiet, a muted energy as they all milled around, got settled in. Stuck mainly to themselves. He wanted to call it something like peace, but it felt too stressed and threadbare to be that. 

George found Liebgott off by himself, leaned back against the side of a mostly demolished barn. He sat perched on a crate, his legs sprawled out in front of him, head tipped back. Eyes closed, enjoying the remaining warmth of the waning daylight. The blue of the sky warmed and colored as the sun dipped down into the tops of the trees out in the distance. The field rustled in the gentle breeze as George crossed through it. Picturesque, there was the ten cent word.

“Hey,” he called. He stopped before Liebgott and waited for him to open his eyes. He didn’t. George braced his hands on his hips as he stood over him. “Let’s say a fella was in desperate need of a decent haircut around here—would he be barking up the wrong tree asking you?”

“I’m sleeping. I’m asleep.” 

He nudged Liebgott’s leg with the toe of his boot. “C’mon. Got a pack of smokes with your name on it you say yes.”

Liebgott cracked his eyes open and squinted up at George. He didn’t say anything for a beat, his face drawn with casual annoyance. Nothing new there. “Yeah. Yeah, alright.” Liebgott yawned wide and gestured down in front of him. “Take a seat.”

George tossed the pack of Lucky Strikes at him. “No mohawk,” he said as he quickly lit his own cigarette. 

He sat on the ground. The earth felt cool beneath him and the scratchy dry grass. He bent his legs and draped his forearms over his knees, his back curved forward. It felt good to sit. Felt even better when Liebgott started combing through his hair with his fingers. He pushed through the thick growth, ruffled it some.

“Christ, you shoulda come to me sooner. Wasn’t for that goofy face of yours, someone might mistake you for a dame.” 

George grunted, nothing more to add. For once, he didn’t feel like talking. They both stayed quiet as Liebgott got to work. George watched the sun continue to set, the sky spilling out orange and red into the horizon. Liebgott’s fingers continued to brush through his hair, then dragged against his scalp. George tensed at the unexpected tremble sent through him. He raised his cigarette to his mouth and took a long and deep drag. He deliberately did not let himself think about the last time Liebgott had touched him; the ground had been cold beneath him then, too. He focused instead on the snip of the scissors, the dirt limned into the seams of his dungarees. He picked at the patched material at his knee, flaked with dust from the road, some mud, Christ knew what else. It was hard not to remember them dirtier, himself dirtier, on his knees in cold, wet snow, the bright stain of blood seeping into him along with the chill. He wasn’t going to think about that either.

George shivered, unable to stop it, when he felt the brief touch of Liebgott’s fingers against the bare skin along the nape of his neck. He felt very aware of his skull, which was a fucking weird thing for a man to be aware of. Liebgott cradled it in the width of his hand same as you might a priceless vase or maybe a live grenade. He could feel Joe’s fingertips; he could feel the escalating hammer of his own heart. When he’d come looking for him, he hadn’t anticipated any kind of intimacy. It was a fucking haircut. It hadn’t been like this any other time Liebgott had done this for him: perched on the end of his cot in their barracks at Toccoa, in that airfield in Upottery before the Normandy jump, on base in Aldbourne. They hadn’t been alone, that was one thing. But there were a thousand other charged details crowding together and demanding his attention that George was slowly coming to realize he was gonna have to live with if he made it out of here. In the last few days, what with the warmer weather and their proximity to the border, he’d begun to feel something he thought of as relief. He thought that was supposed to be good, but if anything, it opened the door to a whole lot else. Exhaustion, grief, just flayed fucking nerves—it was all there. It was all that much more pronounced, as if in direct comparison—hell, opposition even—to that sense of relief. He clenched his teeth as he swallowed, the muscle flexing at the hinge of his jaw.

He wasn’t shivering now—he was shaking, all of him. His hands gripped tight at his shins, as if to hold himself steady. He realized then that Joe wasn’t cutting his hair now, just massaging his scalp with one hand. He rubbed at the base of his neck, where it bridged to shoulder, with the other.

“You’re alright,” he heard him say, very quiet, but still very much so his voice. If George was ever going to cry, now was the time to do it. He didn’t. The sky blurred before his eyes. It grew darker, and he waited for Liebgott to finish. 

They crept closer to the German border and George began to engage in dangerous thinking. He wasn’t the only one—everyone talked about what they were thinking of doing after the war. He’d listened to Perconte for the better part of a half-hour as he detailed his designs for opening a shoe repair shop only to overhear him grill Popeye on his thoughts on the advantages of starting up a dry cleaning service instead. The future was out there, glimmering mirage-like and just as untrustworthy. Close enough to grab, far enough to lose: they all still reached for it. 

After the sack of yet another town, they were granted a few minutes of down time. Seated in the rubble, George had his back up against the only wall that remained of a decimated building; in another life, it had been a pharmacy. Liebgott sat near him, watching as the POWs were prepped for transport and their convoy line came through. He shook his head, then looked over towards George. 

“I didn’t think I’d miss it so much, y’know?”

“Miss what?” George said when Lieb didn’t give him anything more. 

Liebgott scoffed. “My fucking job.”

“Yeah,” George drawled. “Who’d’ve thunk?” 

“I like to drive. Traffic, the open road—you name it, long as I’m the one behind the wheel. Hell, even with the loudmouths I’d get, yammering on and on in the backseat, it was fine. The only fare I got any grief for are the bad tippers. That’s some real shit right there, lemme tell you. And the drunks. The drunks, I could do without.” He kept going and George listened, more or less. He nodded his head, grunted in agreement or dissent when appropriate. He let his eyes drift shut. Liebgott was spun-up, talking fast and excited, his adrenaline still high from the brief assault. The only thing that action had left George with was tired. If he could, he thought he’d sleep for an entire fucking week. Sleep like the fucking buried dead. 

“I can’t wait to get back. Get back in the cab, and just go.” Fuck, even Liebgott had fallen victim to it—the allure of the future. The allure of the future: sounded like the title of some shit film George would most definitely enjoy watching.

“You ever been out to California?”

George cracked one eye open. “Lieb, the only place I been’s where the Army sent me.”

That got a low chuckle out of him. “You’d like it,” he said after a good while. After the quiet had started to creep in between them and George let his eyes go heavy again. “You should go.”

“Yeah. I should. The good lord willing and all.”

George’s eyes were still closed, his head rested against the wall. Just like Haguenau everything smelled of cold mud and plaster dust, the acrid ozone from spent mortar rounds. If he tried hard enough, maybe it could all fade away and he’d see the future too, clear as a pretty picture on a postcard sent to himself. 

“You know what I’m gonna do when we get back?” George said. He opened his eyes. He didn’t wait for a response. "I’m gonna find the first really, truly, fucking knockout broad I can get my eyes and maybe my hands on, killer rack, maybe a redhead. And what I’m gonna do is marry her mousy little friend. You know girls like that always got a shy friend like that, and that’s who I’ll marry. And I’m gonna tell anybody who asks I’m gonna be the next Bob Hope, and maybe I will make my way through the doors of a comedy club or two and maybe somebody somewhere’ll wanna pay me a penny for my thoughts, but what it’s gonna be is me and the mousy girl and a house, if we’re lucky, and there’ll be kids, ‘cause there’s gotta be kids, and maybe a dog, if I can stand it, and I’ll wear a tie when I got to, and this place, all this—it’ll just be something that lives in a drawer, y’know? And when people ask me, ‘hey, Luz?’ Or, no—no, it’ll be George. They’ll say, ‘hey, ya, George, you happy?’ I’ll say yes. And it won’t matter if I mean it.”

“Jesus,” Liebgott said. His jaw twitched. George knew him well enough, he knew the tells: he must not have cared for something George said in all that. “That’s bleak. Fuck.”

George snorted. He rolled his neck, his eyes still heavy-lidded and tired. His cigarette had burnt down to ash between his lips, flaking off down the front of his jacket. He felt too beat to lift his hand to his mouth, so he didn’t. “No it’s not. I’ll be alive to say it. That’s the point. And, besides. Not sure what you been told, but that’s all the American dream is, my friend. Turning something out of nothing. Pretending nothing’s really something.” He sounded too serious, both too much and not enough like himself. 

Liebgott reached over suddenly. He took the cigarette out of George’s mouth. His fingers brushed his lips briefly, and George’s eyes were wide open now. He watched as Liebgott flicked the ash off the end of the cigarette, hardly anything left of it worth smoking. He raised it to his mouth anyway, between thumb and forefinger, and took a final drag. 

“Nah.” He exhaled. "Nothing’s still nothing.” He tossed the cigarette butt off into the debris. He dusted his hands off on his dungarees and got to his feet. “Get up,” he said. “Let’s get the fuck outta here.”


	3. Zell Am See

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> New tags added for this installment. Content notes can be found in the chapter's end note. 
> 
> And as always, thank you for reading!

A cork popped and champagne sprayed. Foam bubbled over George’s fist clutched around the neck of the bottle. The Germans had surrendered.

In Berchtesgaden, they got blind drunk off the champagne liberated from the Nazis. Christenson had never had any before; he said, “It’s not so bad,” following every other sip until that first bottle of his was empty. Web didn’t feel similar: “I expected better of our enemy’s stores,” he said, but that didn’t seem to stop him from drinking either. 

“Bet you Captain Nixon ran off with the good shit,” Perco said, unclear if he was kidding or he really thought that. George laughed, even if he really had no point of comparison. All he knew was it fizzed going down and then fizzed in his head like a stick of dynamite just waiting to go off. 

He kept drinking. Drunk was good, and George was a very good drunk. He didn’t go melancholy or sour (it was against his constitution), he didn’t puke (usually), and he didn’t pick fights (okay, that was a lie.) He did know, and this was no lie, that not a lot of men could take to drink and stay jolly. Welsh was one, but they were the exception not the rule. From experience, he knew too many who went morose or self-pitying, they thought enough booze sloshing through their system was an invitation to violence or misery, or both. 

George had a good sense of things, of people, and by the end of the night he could feel when the night had begun to tip dangerously into the bad drunk direction. Liebgott led the charge, belligerent, face flushed and mouth mean. But then, Liebgott was always belligerent, brought to outrage with minimal pressure or provocation. George could hear his voice break out over the din, raised and cracking, a higher range than usual, which could only mean he was certainly drunk and determined to find someone to fight. 

George couldn’t understand a word of what he was yelling, and it didn’t occur to him, fuzzy-headed and most everything about him slack and useless, that Joe was speaking German. Not until he was right before him and saw that he was arguing, one-sided, with a completely bewildered Skinny. Skinny saw them, a flicker of relief as he nodded past George’s shoulder. 

“Wanna translate before I get my ass kicked?” 

George glanced behind him to find Web, just as drunk as the rest of them. His complexion was bright and rosy, his eyes bleary, a freshly opened bottle of self-accused middling champagne at his side. 

“I would love to, but I’m afraid what with all the slurring, even the best trained ear wouldn’t be able to decipher any of that.” He gestured towards Liebgott with his champagne bottle. Liebgott leapt to his feet immediately, and here we fucking go, George thought. 

George stepped between them, broke up the trouble clearly brewing. He pressed a firm hand to the center of Liebgott’s chest to hold him off. Surprising him, Liebgott didn’t move any further. He might’ve gone still, but his face was a snarl of indescribable rage, and George knew, the same way instinct could ping a man and make his hair stand on end, that his rage wasn’t directed at any one man in this room. That it was rooted in the language that spilled from him like an opened wound.

“Alright, buddy,” George said slowly. He tried to get him to meet his eye, but Liebgott remained unfocused. George didn’t think he wanted to know what he was seeing. "It’s all good, Lieb. I agree with you, okay? I _do_ think it’s time we call it a night. What d’you say, fellas? Enough fun for one night?”

No one answered him. No one argued with him either. Skinny took this as his opportunity to slink off, so he did. It dawned on George as he stood there, in the midst of the men, well past the point of exhausted, a nauseatingly sweet taste stuck on the back of his tongue, that beyond his initial periphery he didn’t recognize most of these boys. It was a celebration, but too few Toccoa men were here for it. And there it was, the descent into bad drunk. 

“The war is _over_!” he heard Tab scream from across the room. The boys cheered, rowdy and wordless, like maybe they each actually believed that was true.

“Yeah, alright” George said, answering his own question. He slung his arm over Liebgott’s shoulders and tried to both hold him upright and get him to walk. “Enough for one night.”

They were on the road again by morning.

But, first. They were en route to Berchtesgaden and Hitler was dead. 

George liked Germany, which was a fucking shame if you asked him. “Beautiful country. Shame about the war.” He said it a day after they crossed over the border, as they drove through scenic countryside. He said it in a jokey, rich man voice—a voice Webster probably knew well if his slightly offended expression was anything to go by.

Over the course of their travel, George was starting to understand why every time Webster was brought up in conversation, Liebgott always felt it necessary to say, “Fucking Web,” with a shake of his head. Fucking Web wouldn’t stop fucking talking. 

Web was the only one who wanted to talk about Landsberg. George didn't want to think about it, even if he couldn’t stop thinking about it. He imagined the rest of them were in a similar predicament. In the immediate days after, that excited energy they had brought over the German border had gone muted. They were quiet. It was only Web who would bring it up. Web, who repeated the same rumors they’d all heard about the other camps, who kept saying the same tough-talking lines over and over again—those sick Nazi fucks, barbaric and monstrous, something something, blah blah, teach them a goddamn lesson, and so on and so forth, even though no one was listening to him, least of all the aforementioned sick Nazi fucks.

Finally, one bright morning as they drove through Bavaria, George snapped. “Jesus Christ, alright, already. We heard you the first time, cowboy. Now either saddle up or shut the fuck up.” His tone was a lot more caustic than maybe he meant or it was exactly what he meant, he didn’t know. He just wanted some quiet, he wanted a goddamn nap. The sun was hot beating down on them and the truck lurched over uneven terrain. He couldn’t close his eyes. He couldn’t get rid of the smell. He wanted a drink or he wanted eight, he wanted to smoke a whole carton of cigarettes. He wanted to go home. 

When he looked up, he found Liebgott watching him oddly. There was a slight frown to his mouth, his eyes tired, too. George remembered him in the convoy back from the camp. His head bowed, Babe sat beside him, a protective stance to his body as if trying to shield Liebgott from any further attention. George was on the other side of him, uncertain if the trembling of Liebgott’s body was from their travel over rough road or something worse. Something too personal. Nothing was personal in the army; they’d learned that lesson but good. All the same, George purposefully did not look at him. He didn’t look back at the camp either. No one spoke in the truck; they all rode in silence. It made something deep inside him ache. So he reached over, he squeezed the nape of Liebgott’s neck, then dropped his hand to the center of his back and held it there. Liebgott reared away from him and George returned his hand back down to his lap, as if he hadn’t done anything. Next to him, he heard Liebgott breathe in deep, exhale just as loudly. The truck slowed to brake, guys already getting to their feet to disembark. Liebgott had reached over abruptly and clutched at George’s thigh, just above the knee, and then his hand was gone. 

Now, Liebgott nodded once, and then he looked away. That was what you did, if you wanted to get out of here in one piece. You looked away. George did too.

The sun was high overhead and Liebgott was still shuffling the cards.

“Come on, deal me in,” George said. He flicked his lighter, inhaled quick and deep.

This was nearly a month ago, not long after their initial arrival into Germany. Then, it was all springtime and sunny days, infectious excitement as they marched closer and closer to the war’s end. Time felt liquid here, as if you could swim in it forward and back and forget which direction you traveled.

“Perconte’s got a funny little story about you he’s been passing around,” Liebgott said.

George rolled his eyes. Beside him, Christenson was already laughing. “I refuse to be shamed. I did what any red-blooded male in my position woulda done, and that was make a move on the very shapely, very blonde young woman who crossed my path.”

“Yeah, the shame comes with the failure,” Johnny said. Liebgott snickered. 

“Any other red-blooded male mighta actually had some success,” he added, eyebrows lifted as he started to deal.

“Fuck all of you.” George held his arms open. “Hey, a man’s desperate. I’ll take any shot I can get. It’s been months since I had a girl. And meanwhile, Janovec’s fucking his way up the Rhine.”

“All this time and you still don’t know your geography,” Johnny again, mostly under his breath. 

George ignored him. He picked up his cards, barely glanced at them. “It’s the language barrier, y’know. I really am a charming man when you can understand the words coming out of my mouth.” An idea lit up in his head; like most things he said, he spoke before he examined it further. “I shoulda brought you with me,” he said to Liebgott. “Made you my interpreter. You could sprechen the Deutsch and help spread-en the legs.”

Liebgott smirked at him, for once not distracted by the cards in his hand. He took the game seriously for someone who all too often refused to abide by the rules. Liebgott was a fairly intimidating cardsharp, and George should know: he was one, too. 

Liebgott’s mouth moved liquid and slow as it lifted into a grin, dirty as anything directed at George in his life. It was the kind of grin you jerked off thinking about, Rita Hayworth maybe gracing you with such a sight. But this was Lieb. He didn’t say a word, just looked at George, with that grin. Made him feel like he had missed a step and dropped down into dangerous unknown territory. George didn’t think he had it in him to look at anyone, let alone another man, like that himself. He wasn’t built for it, too open and too goofy. To make someone feel like that, you had to have mystery. You had to be a little scary. He was neither of those things. 

For a brief moment, despite all of Easy crowded with them in the square, despite Captain Nixon gearing up for his headlines of the world briefing, it felt as if it was just the two of them. They were alone. George felt hot all over; he blamed the sun. 

“Yeah, George. Next time I’ll lend you a hand,” Joe finally said.

George cleared his throat. He looked down at his cards without really seeing them. He tried to make himself focus. A Jack, a four, both spades, a nine of hearts, a useless goddamn hand. 

“Fold,” he said quickly. He tossed down his cards. He glanced back at Nixon, tried to fix his attention on him. All the while, he could swear he still felt a pair of eyes on him.

Now, they were in Austria. Zell Am See, their nicest lodgings yet. Here, it truly did feel like the war was over. They had the unspoiled beauty of the mountains, the crystal clear water that barely moved, flat and calm. They rose to so many cloudless mornings, just blue sky that mirrored the stretch of water beneath. And after more than a year at war, they shifted from a combat force to an occupation force, a distinction, George noted, that was marked by a sharp increase in idleness and boredom. 

Not long after their arrival, they celebrated their one-year anniversary at war. They drank, too much as always, and they sang old songs, invented dirty new ones. They grew rowdier and rowdier, as if to not balance out then block out the dread of what they feared to come next, an ocean away. 

“Happy Anniversary, fellas,” George called out. Their tankards clanked as they met in salute, lager sloshing over the side. “I’ll see you all in hell.”

The flamethrower cut through the brush on the screen while the announcer’s proud voice praised the United States Marine Corps. George watched the news reel footage from behind the resistant remnants of one hell of a hangover. More shots of the war out in the Pacific flickered over the screen, sweaty dirty men with their rifles scampering through jungle, across a desolate beach, through exploding palm trees. “Christ,” he muttered. It was neatly the inverse of their experience in Bastogne, he thought. He took the cigarette from his mouth and exhaled. 

He leaned across More suddenly and socked Liebgott in the arm. “What’d I tell you, Lieb? They’d send us some place worse, huh?” Liebgott scoffed around his cigarette, his mouth crooked. He had a wan look about him, nearly green, clearly worse off in the hangover department than George himself was. More pushed George off of him with a half-hearted, “Shut up, Luz.” 

“What did I tell you?” he repeated under his breath.

The restlessness as they waited to return to either home or war manifested in the worst possible outcome: Grant got shot. It was late that same night when Liebgott caught George in the hall, George on his way back from the head.

“Any word?”

“Nah,” George said. “No change.” He glanced quick back towards Liebgott. “How about,” and he trailed off.

“That piece of shit? With the MPs now.”

George thought that would be the end of it. But Liebgott followed him into the room, his arms folded around his middle as if he was physically holding himself up, clearly on the point of saying something. He kept quiet as George got his boots off, not exactly watching him but not looking away either.

George flopped down on his cot. Perconte snored; the sound spiked as he rolled over towards the wall. He’d always been a good sleeper, but he slept like the fucking dead now that the Germans had surrendered. “Come on, out with it. What is it?”

Liebgott didn’t say anything at first. He sat down on the edge of the cot, practically on George’s feet. “Speirs. He didn’t shoot him.”

God, he was too tired for this. George ran a hand through his hair and tipped his head back. He reached blindly for his cigarettes. “Nah,” he said lightly. "Guess he decided to let justice take its due course.”

“I woulda shot him.”

“Yeah. Well. You didn’t.” George was so sick of this fucking war, over as it supposedly was, he could spit. 

“I would’ve fucking killed him.”

“Yeah? Sounds like you didn’t make any stops en route to the MPs, did you?”

“I should’ve.”

“Alright, then haul ass to the brig or wherever the fuck they’re holding him, unholster your service weapon and put one between his eyebrows.”

“That’s not what I’m saying.” Joe managed to sound both irritated and exhausted at once. His voice had gone not louder but higher-pitched, on the verge of breaking. 

George flicked his lighter but he didn’t light the cigarette in his mouth. He knew now what he was talking about. People liked to accuse George of having a big mouth, but he wasn’t the only one: everyone in this company talked, especially to him. He’d heard about the trek out to the commandant and the bullet he took in the back. George could feel a wry, _Well, you didn’t kill him either_ , threatening to make a break for it before he bit down on it. For once, he knew better. He knew there was a different pulse that beat inside of Liebgott, one George was constitutionally unfit to understand. Not the way Liebgott did. It was more fundamental and necessary than simple vengeance, but it was the closest word George had at hand to describe it. That was what you had to do for the things you didn’t feel but knew lived inside another person: you had to give them names, and it with it came something as messy and inexact as empathy.

“We both know that’s not the same sort of shit.” He shrugged off Liebgott’s questioning look. Liebgott looked old to him all of a sudden and he didn't like it. Maybe it was the dim lighting or maybe he was that tired, maybe he’d aged that much since he met him back at Camp Toccoa. “I heard about it,” he waved his hand in the air, mimed a gun, didn’t know how to mime _German death camp commandant_ so he didn’t even try. “You went up a hill and bagged yourself a German. Or so I heard.”

“Fucking Web.”

George shifted on his back. His foot bumped against Liebgott’s hip. He didn’t move away. “Skinny, actually.”

“No shit?”

George shrugged. “Not to be a tattletale or nothing. He needed a shoulder to whine on and mine was free.”

Liebgott scoffed. “They shoulda put you in intelligence, the way you gather info.”

“Gave me a fucking radio instead. Besides, pretty sure these loose lips woulda sunk a ship or two.” They both kept their voices quiet—for Perconte’s sake, probably. Liebgott was looking at his mouth like maybe it really could’ve cost them a war or something equally expensive. 

“What would you have done, you went up with me and Web and Skinny?”

“Oh, Christ, Lieb, I don’t know.”

“I saw you, you stayed out the room tonight.”

“Yeah, well, someone needed to sit with Tab and I was more than fine with that being me.” Anger and defensiveness prickled at him, and he didn’t care for either. “I’m sick of it, alright?" he spat out. "I’m fucking sick of the blood and the killing and how every little goddamn thing’s gotta be life or death. I’m tired. I’m so fucking tired.”

“So you wouldn’t’ve killed him?”

“No, Joe, I woulda let you.” They both went silent them. It wasn’t a righteous thing to say, but it was the truth. George would’ve let him, and it wouldn’t have mattered if it was right or not. It was what Joe wanted. Joe met his eye. George thought he understood. 

Beside them, Perconte snored noisily. 

“Gonna put a fucking sock in there, one of these days, I swear to god,” George grumbled. 

Liebgott’s mouth cracked into a grin. “You been saying that since Toccoa.” He nodded towards Perconte.

“One of these days,” he said again, distracted. He still hadn’t lit that cigarette. He felt like he needed to tell Liebgott something, but he didn’t have the fluency for it. The words. He didn’t know how to hand out reassurances head-on; instead he dealt them out with the strengths he knew he had: humor, a good laugh. Hell, a cigarette. None of those would serve him right now, wouldn’t help Joe. 

“You could’ve, in there. You coulda shot him,” George said. “No one would’ve stopped you. Everyone would’ve covered for you. No blame. But you didn’t.”

“Speirs woulda killed me.”

“Maybe, but then who’d he get to translate and help collect all his little German treasures for him?”

“Jesus, I’ll take that over working the checkpoint any fucking day. That how you been living since they got you working as platoon runner? The lap of goddamn luxury?”

“I’m regular royalty here.” A pause followed, some of that heaviness beginning to creep back in between them. George nudged at his hip with his foot again, deliberate this time. “You ain’t done nothing you shouldn’t’ve, Joe. You’re alright.”

“Yeah. I know that.”

“Good. ‘cause I gotta get some shut eye if I’m expected up at the ass crack of dawn, calisthenics in the name of Old Glory or Colonel Sink or who-the-fuck-ever.”

Joe got to his feet. He patted George on the leg, above his ankle. He then gave him a longer squeeze, his grip a little too tight. “Get your rest, Sleeping Beauty.”

A kick to the leg of his cot shook him awake. 

“Wake up, Sleeping Beauty.” 

He remembered that: for the better part of a year, George woke each morning to each of the following—a kick to his cot; Liebgott’s sardonic voice, still scratchy with sleep; the morning crisp and dark, the sun yet to rise. And George would get up. 0500, and he’d be ready, dressed with the rest of them. He and Liebgott would share a cigarette outside their barracks before their morning run, the grass still dew slick, the both of them a special kind of stupid.

He remembered that, too.

“So how many you got?” Ramirez asked.

“Nuh-uh, veto,” George said quickly. He held up his hands and adopted a high society British accent. “Highly impolitic dinner table conversation, I’ll have you know, good sir. A gentleman knows he must speak not of politics, not of religion, nor money, and, least of all, points.” He shrugged and went back to his chow and back to being nothing more than George Luz. “Hey, like all of the above—if you got ‘em, no one wants to know, and if you don’t, who gives a fuck.”

An appreciative chuckle rippled through the men as they continued to eat. “What’re you even asking for?” Liebgott said. “You know the answer if you're still sitting here: not enough. Fuck.” He stabbed at his remaining chow as if he wished he had a bayonet—and most like a prone body, for that matter. 

He wasn’t wrong. None of them had the points to get out of here. So, here they were. Morning drills and practice maneuvers, checkpoint duty. Patrol was long past them, and their days accrued like this, with a restless idleness George hadn’t known for going on three years. They had more free time than they had sense to do with it.

That morning, they ran. Thankfully, George thought, not up the side of a goddamn mountain. The rhythm of the men matched as they all fell in together. Someone back in the middle of the pack started to sing. After a few paces, George joined in, loudest of all them. 

“… _we’re fighters of the night, we’re dirty sonsabitches, we’d rather fuck than fight!”_ They kept running and they kept singing, the lake air cool and easy and good to breathe. But for a moment, it was almost as if the war had yet to even begin for them. They were back where they started, they were running, they were headed into the fight. 

“ _Zim zam, goddamn, we’re the parachute infantry!”_

Better than nothing, they still had their weekend passes. 

They spent that Saturday night in an Austrian pub that had fast become their usual watering hole, the midsummer heat tolerable when served with a cold beer. George drank. He shot the shit with the boys, struck out with the ladies. Any other Saturday night; George might’ve been sat at any other bar.

He watched over the lip of his pint as Liebgott approached. That wasn’t interesting. What was interesting was the girl on his arm. She was out of both their leagues, and she stood there like she knew it. 

“Well, hel _lo_ ,” George said, addressing her instead of Liebgott.

“You’ll have to try _guten tag_ if you’re looking for conversation with this one.”

George pulled a faux-impressed face and lifted his eyebrows before reluctantly turning his attention to Liebgott. “Would ya take a look at you, you—whatever the German equivalent of a Romeo is.”

“A Joseph D. Liebgott, I should think.” Liebgott flashed a sly smile, teeth and trouble. George both felt his blood go hot and his body go tense. If pressed, he didn’t think he’d be able to explain why. He wouldn’t want to. Liebgott fulfilled the instinct within the next moment.

“You wanna share?”

George’s brain short-circuited for a second, his face a comic portrait of surprise. The second stretched into a lengthier measure of time. His face must’ve done something else—his face was always doing something—because Liebgott snickered at him.

“I asked Web, but he went shy on me.”

George inhaled; it sounded like the start of a laugh. He leaned back a little on his barstool, acutely aware of his balance or lack thereof, and brought his stein to his mouth. This was more familiar ground—smarting off to each other, making digs where they could. “Oh, gee. What any man longs to hear—second choice. I’m touched. Grateful I wasn’t third. Intrigued, if I’m being honest, who else might be on that list following my name.”

“That a no, Luz?”

There was an edge to Liebgott that poked at George’s curiosity like bad wiring in an electrical socket. He pursed his lips together. The stein felt heavy in his hand, felt like the hand belonged to a different body. The girl on Liebgott’s arm looked like she was long bored of the both of them. He didn’t think that boded all that well for any future anticipated activities.

“I was only joking before, y’know. About needing a translator.”

“I know, George. You’re always just kidding.” Something was there, both in his words as much as his voice, that George was afraid to touch, so he didn’t. “But you really gonna look a gift horse in the mouth, and all that?”

“Depends. Which one of you’s the horse?”

“So, that is a no.” No question mark there, and George knew exactly what he was doing. It was a challenge, same as every other dumb dare one of them would goad the other into back at Toccoa. George sat up a little straighter. There was very little that threw him off his center. Needless to say, this did. His imagination didn’t know how to feed the interest Lieb had sparked in him. And he knew. There was only thing doing: you had to see it through. 

“Well, now, I don’t see a secretary sitting anywhere around here taking down notes, but if I do recall, and I recall clearly, I can’t say the word _no_ was anywhere in my previous statements.” George eyed the woman again. Her boredom had deepened that much more, clearly uninterested in the deliberation occurring between the both of them. “Is she alright with…?”

“For the love of god, George. Just say yes.”

George's mouth tilted up. His face as flushed with drink or something warmer. “Fine. Yes.”

The bed was noisier than the three of them combined. It creaked and shrieked and whined in protest of either their shared weight or the activities committed upon it. The girl was on her knees between them, and George felt a gross twinge of guilt that he never did get her name. She didn't seem concerned. She didn’t seem interested in his name either. Instead, she was reaching for the placket on his trousers.

So this was really happening. 

She’d taken them back to a place crowded with other GIs, and George knew that both this place, and by extension the girl, was something you paid for. He thought about asking Lieb about it, but then they were upstairs, and then there was a small room, and then the door was shut. There was a bed, and some questions really weren’t worth the answer you got for them. 

It was awkward at first, and of course it was. You shared everything in the Army, sure, but this was new. She undressed herself quickly, didn’t look to them for help, which was fine. She kissed both of them with an active disinterest that proved both mercenary and obligatory and probably should have registered as insulting, but George’s heart was beating too quickly to really care. He wasn’t thinking about her, not really; maybe he thought about her hand, unmoving against his still-clothed prick. Instead, he was hyperaware of Liebgott’s proximity. Where his hands were on her body versus where his own were. How close they were. She didn’t have enough body to let them achieve any distance. George let her unbutton his shirt, watched as she did the same to Joe. She was naked and Joe had his fingers between her legs, and George watched that too, breathing hard, his own hand cupped around her breast, idly playing with her nipple. Something else was going on here, and he kept trying to stop himself from thinking that. That was the sort of unforgivable shit you couldn’t take back, same as killing a man or moving too slow in a firefight or letting a buddy get himself killed. Once you saw it, you couldn’t take it back. Certain truths could be neither buried nor erased. 

She kissed George lazily as Joe’s fingers slipped inside of her. He was crouched before her and she had her back to George’s front, her head tipped back but not far enough. He still had to bend and reach. 

“Never thought of you as the generous type, Lieb.” He had to say something. The quiet, broken only by the wet smack of a mouth on another, of Joe’s fingers moving in and out of her with a briskness that made George feel stupidly desperate and molten, the punctuated occasional sharp intake of a breath—it was too much.

Joe looked up at him. His mouth had a swollen look to it, ripe and pink, and George didn’t think that was something he was meant to take stock of. His throat was long, and it bobbed when he swallowed. He had a glint in his eye that with any other man might be worth pushing, fucking around with, but with Joe he knew it only meant trouble. He didn't want to think about how he was paying more attention to Joe than to this girl, lax and pliant, all but in his lap. He knew Joe, he decided. He’d been at his side for the last three years, the both of them living in each other’s pocket. Of course he paid attention to him; it was the same as paying attention to himself.

“You gonna fuck her or what?” He said it kinda mean; George liked that. 

And that was another thing: Joe kept speaking in English, even though this girl only knew German. He spoke, in English, about George, to her. He addressed her, told her what George was going to do to her, that she was going to like it. George knew in his bones whatever kind of performance this was, it was solely for him. And if George was paying strict attention to Joe, then Joe was returning it in kind. He watched George as she finally got his trousers open. She shoved his skivvies down, near clinical in her care of him, and got his cock out. He was hard already, and why the fuck wouldn’t he be? A naked woman pawing at him, her mouth on him, tasting sweet and good even if she also tasted like the waxy perfume of her lipstick.

His hands were clumsy as he got the rubber on. Joe was still talking. He could feel his eyes on him as his cock leapt in his fist. Joe, in English still, asked her if she was gonna take that fat cock in her cunt (which, personally, wasn’t at all how George would ever consider describing his dick—it was average, if it was anything—but, hell, he’d take the compliment, he’d take a lot of things from him.) He was looking at George when he said it. Joe’s hand went to the fly of his own trousers. He palmed himself before he opened them, and George didn’t move. He was watching Joe. He watched him as he took his prick out. Everything about Joe was thinner than George: narrow, bony hips, curved cock thin, hard, head flush with his flat stomach. He thought about what that had felt like, pressed against him, flat on his back in the cold earth. He flushed, so far out of his element, as George lined himself up with her, his hands on her hips, as she got down on all fours.

“You gonna like that? Getting fucked by him?”

“Jesus Christ, Joe,” George said, out of breath already as he pushed into her. 

George fucked her from behind while Joe fucked her mouth. He only wanted her mouth, that was what he had said. He kept his eyes on George the entire time. George knew that because he kept his eyes on Joe. It only made George question a whole ton of shit he’d more or less refused to touch or engage with, like a live flame he just knew was gonna burn him if he got too close. He questioned a lot of shit as he watched the girl take the head of Joe’s cock into her mouth, heard the relieved sound he made as she did. He could remember him making a similar sound, against the side of his face, as he rutted against him. He wanted to know if that was what Joe had really wanted from George back in that foxhole, if he had thought about getting George’s mouth on him. Maybe women were perfunctory for Joe. They weren’t for George, he was pretty sure about that. The girl felt great around his dick, felt good, better than he remembered any of the girls he’d fucked back home or in Georgia or England had been. At the same time, he thought of Joe again. He thought of that foxhole. Thought of the pressure of his body on his, the weight of him. His hand in his hair. This was good, but he wanted that. His eyes tripped between Joe’s mouth, parted open as he made eager panting noises, and his cock, where it entered her mouth, dragged out wet. George couldn’t decide who he was imagining himself as, when it was he had removed himself from his own role in this, when fucking this girl while good wasn’t entirely enough and instead he started picturing his mouth on Joe, pictured Joe’s mouth on him, and he wanted it, he did. It crept over him slowly and then all at once, the realization, the understanding, that he wasn’t here for the woman between them, but, rather, for Joe. He more than suspected—or was it hope? did he treat hope the same way the detectives in Joe’s stories would approach anything and everything, as if it was only a matter of time before betrayal?—that Joe felt similar.

He took a shaky breath in, exhaled in a falling moan. He felt like he was burning up from the inside out. He fucked her harder, a particularly vicious thrust that pushed her face forward onto Joe’s cock. They earned a mangled sound from Joe.

“That’s it, George,” he said, so he did it again. “That’s it, fuck.”

George’s dog tags clinked together, nestled against a sparse spread of chest hair and sweaty skin. They were matched by Joe’s own. His shirt was open too, a flash of metal as his dog tags jostled against his flushed chest. Visible beneath the opened collar was the cut of his clavicle, reaching out sharp to his shoulder. George wanted to bite it. He tried to push the thought away, embraced it instead. 

Joe’s eyes never left him, not even when he came. George couldn’t look away either. The intimacy of it made his skin prickle. He nearly said Joe’s name as he continued to fuck her, raced straight for the edge, balls tight and aching. And wouldn’t that have been something. 

The girl left abruptly after, before George could even get the rubber off. She directed a stream of rapid-fire German, thick with audible mockery, at Joe, and then she was gone. It was just the two of them, both of them still mostly clothed, though undressed where it counted. 

George nodded to the door, nervous and overcompensating for it. “What was that about? Uncle Sam gonna be disappointed with what’s left of the American war effort?”

“Don’t get your panties in a twist. All she said was three’s a crowd. You got a smoke?”

George ignored the question, his attention still fixed on the closed door. He didn’t think that was all she said. He didn’t think he wanted to know. Needed to know. What he needed was a smoke, too. He needed to get out of here. The room felt tawdry and cheap now, everything they’d just done not so much wrong as it was—what exactly? Unforgivable, maybe, but even that sounded too grave and self-important for what had just transpired. You couldn’t take it back; there was no plausible deniability, no way to construe this as an accident, even if at no point did George touch Joe and Joe touch George. But he wanted it and he knew it, and that was the problem, wasn’t it? His skin felt like it was too small for his body, stretched too tight. He was too aware of himself, inside and out. He had gotten a glimpse at something, dark and waiting, buried deep within him, and he didn’t know what the hell he was supposed to do with it. Didn’t know what to do with Joe, flopped back on the bed, slowly putting his dick back into his trousers. 

George was already dressed, more or less presentable. He was on his feet, headed for the door. He tried to marshal some of his usual jokey bravado but instead he couldn’t stop picturing Joe’s face as he came.

“I’m gonna,” and he nodded his head, hand already turning the doorknob. “I need a drink.”

“You’re welcome, by the way,” Joe called after him.

They acted like nothing happened. And maybe nothing did. War warped and stretched the very concept of normalcy. Routine. What was acceptable and what wasn’t. You went around collecting things you didn’t want to admit to yourself.

George spent a few days suspecting that anyone who so much as looked at him knew what he wanted, but nothing came of it. Nothing even from Lieb, and that was both good and bad. It was like anything else about him, he thought: good and bad. 

The following weekend, Sunday morning found them free of orders. George traipsed down to the water’s edge. The lake glistened, flat enough to make a man wanna make like Christ and try to walk across. It was the start to a beautiful day, and the bulk of Easy all had the same idea. Several were collected in the shallows, splashing and dunking. Beyond them, a solitary figure cut neat strokes as he swam past the dock. 

Like most mornings as of late, George was mercilessly hungover. He didn’t trust himself to go into the water and not inadvertently drown himself to counter his throbbing headache. Instead, he took a seat beside Web. Web was writing something down, his penmanship neat and measured, though god help George and his well-earned woes, he couldn’t bring himself to focus long enough to make out a single word. His loss. Spoke a lot, he thought, to his condition that he didn’t even try to snatch the pages out of Web’s hands. 

He flopped down into the grass, laid out on his back. He lit a cigarette and a laid a hand over his chest. He lay there, smoking, his mind as blank as the open blue sky above him, visible only as a thin line, his eyes barely parted open.

Beside him, Web was saying something. George let him talk, idle conversation, Web doing the heavy lifting. It was easy enough to listen without listening; George grunted occasionally to signify he’d heard him, content and sleepy as a cat. 

Eventually, he sat up on his elbows. The guys had grown noisier down at the dock, shoving and roughhousing, leaping into the water. Liebgott was among the men there. George’s eye was stupidly drawn to him, picking him immediately out of the crowd. His chest was bare and still pale, his dog tags glinting against the sun and against wet skin. He thought of that small room, he thought of his body, so close to his own. His gaze skimmed over his narrow chest, his ribs laddered visible along lean muscle. Lieb looked like you could crack him right over your knee, and George wasn’t certain if he found that a good thing or a bad.

It occurred to him that both he and Web were eyeing the same target. George smoked his cigarette down, hoped something wry would spring to his mouth to say.

Web spoke first instead.

“He’s enough to drive you crazy, isn’t he?” Most things Web said sounded wistful, and this didn't sound any different. If anything though, it was as if that wistfulness was not his own but something he lent to George.

George rolled the taste of what Web had said around in his mouth. He dropped back down into the grass. He felt uncomfortably warm, as if caught and seen. As if they had an accord. 

“Yeah, well, at this point, who isn’t?”

Web laughed. George didn’t think he believed him.

They bided their time, waiting to get out of Austria. Waiting for the war with Japan to end. So much of the Army was just that: waiting. Doing time. 

It was another Saturday night and, as if an inevitability they had all agreed to previously, the boys were fighting. The jeering was ugly and noisy, but nowhere as loud as the shatter of breaking glass.

George stood there. He leaned against the bar and he watched the fight with casual indifference, smoking. Drinking. For once, he’d had nothing to do with this particular melee. Like most else tied to the war, he was over it. 

The fight got out of hand in a hurry. Scrapping was one thing, but grievous bodily harm was a whole other kettle of fish. George ground out the butt of his cigarette into an already crowded ashtray and then he reached forward, grabbed for the arm nearest to him. Liebgott’s. Of fucking course; of all the gin joints, and all that. Liebgott reared back, running mean on hot-blooded instinct, and he punched George in the face. George staggered back, just barely kept his balance. 

“What the fuck, Lieb?” He must’ve bit his lip at the impact—he could taste blood. Liebgott’s fist had landed at a slant, a glancing blow along his cheekbone that smarted immediately, made his eyes water. Made him want to hit him back. Liebgott was looking at him, breathing hard, his face still thunderously angry and defensive, like he expected it. No—like he invited it. Liebgott’s mood had become an ugly, fickle thing. The war had leeched into him like bad groundwater. With hate. George could understand that. Hell, he felt it, too.

Beer had sloshed over George’s hand and the cuff of his jacket. He still had the stein in his hand, had somehow managed not to drop that. He still knew what mattered, what was most important, he thought ruefully. He threw back the rest of it, swallowed quickly, then slammed the empty stein down on the bar top. 

“I’m outta here. Go ahead, tear each other apart, I don’t fucking care.”

He went out into the night. Late summer, and it had cooled much more than it ever did during those late summer nights in Georgia. There was a slight chill to the air, as if promising the next season to come. Another season spent that far from home. Goddamn, maybe he wanted to punch something, too.

He tried to light a cigarette, but it bothered his split lip, made it burn. He pocketed the unsmoked cigarette, spat blood in the street. Behind him came the patter of swift footsteps, racing to catch up with him. George cast a quick look behind him, just to be sure that after all this he wasn’t about to get himself murdered. George turned back around. It was only Liebgott. Though based on George’s aching face, murder might still be on the table. 

All the same, George slowed his pace. Let Liebgott catch up to him. 

“Hey,” Liebgott said, slightly out of breath. George glanced over at him. He was mussed from the fight, his shirt wrinkled and untucked, a wild flush to his cheeks. He could see in the low light that the knuckles of his right hand were scraped raw. 

“What? Come lookin’ for round two, champ?” 

He resumed walking and Liebgott went with him. “You shoulda hit me back,” he said.

All that got from George was a bitter laugh. “God, Lieb. Just shut the fuck up already.”

“I wanted you to hit me back.” The change to his tone made the hair on the back of George’s neck stand on end. It wasn’t danger so much as anticipation, though maybe for a smarter man the two were interchangeable. George didn’t think he was all that smart, but if he had learned anything it was that a very specific kind of personality was attracted to volunteer service—they were always itching for a fight. Liebgott was the perfect example of that. Joe Toye had been that too, and come to think, maybe it was George Luz who was attracted to a very specific kind of personality.

They stood at the mouth of an alley. To call it an alley felt like a misnomer—it was nothing like the grungy, trash-stinking alleys he’d known in Providence. Like everything else in this part of Austria, it was clean and well-kept. George gave Liebgott a half-hearted shove into it. Liebgott stumbled back, tripping over both his feet and the cobblestone street, a surprised, curious, expression cresting across his face. 

“That what you wanted?”

“Yeah, George, sure.”

They stepped deeper into the alley, away from the streetlights and potential foot traffic. They both were breathing hard now, like the interminable moments before an advance, the entire universe crystalized into a single choice: do or die. The real world was much more complicated than that. He knew that. He didn’t think they were back in the real world, not yet.

Liebgott reached towards him. He swiped a thumb over George’s bottom lip. There was blood on his thumb, George could feel the wet as it smeared. The gesture would’ve meant nothing in battle. You kept each other safe, you held fast to wounds with dirty hands. It was nothing but survival. He didn’t know what this was.

“Didn’t think I got you there.” 

George met Joe’s eye in the half-dark. They’d made the mistake of planting land mine after land mine into the field that had been their friendship. There was a lot to dodge now, if George didn’t want whatever step he took next to be fatal. The final time. He’d always found it easy enough to care for other people. He liked it. He liked making people laugh, liked knowing they were fine, they were okay, he had done what he could for them. Joe had become too complicated an effort for him now. He didn’t know what would hurt and what would help anymore. 

“Fuck it.” George kissed him. He crowded Joe back, kissed him with a forceful aggression he hadn’t entirely known he possessed.

Joe didn’t do anything. His mouth was slack against George’s, the inaction lasting long enough to make him fear he had somehow misread all of this. But then Joe’s hand was cupping his face and he was kissing him back. Trying to steer it, and wasn’t that just like him. Always on his terms. Joe pushed George, and it was his back that met the wall instead of Joe’s. Joe’s mouth opened over his; he kissed mean and rough, and of course he did. George eagerly met him, his bottom lip stinging. He could taste the blood, knew Joe could too, but it didn’t stop him. The kiss went sloppy, overeager, a wild and bruising energy to it, even as George’s own mouth felt bitter and wanting. Joe pushed his thigh between George’s legs and George said something, smeared thick as his own mouth against Joe’s, uncertain of what he was saying even as the sound left him.

They stopped just as suddenly as they started. They didn’t pull away from each other, but they were no longer kissing. It wasn’t an embrace, or maybe it was, or maybe George needed to learn new names for everything they did, everything he wanted to do, to make it acceptable to himself. 

“Ah, Christ, what the fuck,” George said. He resented the desperation in his voice, his mouth still too close to Joe’s. He felt winded and disoriented, like after a long run downhill in the dark. As a rule, George didn’t do self-doubt. He also didn’t really do self-awareness. And what he really didn’t do was follow rules. But if he wanted Joe, if wanting him made him feel safe, feel okay, then it couldn’t be bad. Right? It couldn’t be bad.

“What the fuck,” he said again.

The following day George ran through morning drill, his lip throbbing. A black eye had developed overnight and his mouth felt tender and bruised. He looked like he was the one who had got his ass kicked at that bar rather than just incidental damage. 

“Jesus, what happened to you, Luz? You go chasing after the frauleins again? They make their lack of interest known against your face? Look at you. Hell of a lovers’ quarrel, huh?”

“Yeah, Perco, something like that.” He nodded down towards the cards he was shuffling. The sun was beginning its descent down towards the water, another day in the books. “You playing, or you afraid of spending another night emptying your pockets?”

“I got my money right where I want it and George Luz ain’t getting a penny of it.”

“Such poor sportsmanship! You fellas hearing this?”

“Yeah, we hear you. And we’re wondering when you’re gonna stop fondling the cards and actually deal a hand, Christ.” Liebgott. A grin spread slowly across his face, directed solely at George. Knowing and secret, as if carried along a wire shared only between them. For the first time, it wasn’t as if last night hadn’t happened. Instead, it was the opposite. Last night was sitting right there between them, and Liebgott was fine with that.

George thought he was, too.

The singer’s English was nearly as bad as George’s German. This was weeks before, barely summer, and their weekend passes were still a novelty. As the singer left the small makeshift stage, the basement pub filled quickly with several loud conversations and laughter. 

George leaned heavily against the bar. It was late, night turning into morning, and he was drunk. He was very drunk. Good drunk, veering into bad. He could feel himself, the scales unbalanced, dangerously close to tipping over into maudlin. He shook his head; he decided he was tired, that was all.

“I’m just tired.” He even said it out loud.

“What?” Liebgott sat beside him. Either he was just as bleary with drink as George was, or it was George’s eyesight that was suffering. He looked like a blur to him, not a man so much as the idea of one. Not for the first time, George thought about reaching out and touching him. Just to make sure he was real. It didn’t have to be anything much, just his hand, his fingers, brushed against Liebgott’s wrist. Down the back of his hand to trace the ridged lines raised, veiny and human, similar to his own. Liebgott, like everything else about him, had thin hands, long and skinny fingers. Any other capacity, outside violence, they might be considered elegant. He thought about those fingers touching him, a negative, a reverse, of his original thought. Did that mean that he himself wanted to make sure he was real? Or did he just want to be touched? Still watching his hands, George drained the rest of his pint. He stopped himself from looking at Liebgott, did not stop himself from ordering another.

That same singer came back and took the stage again to both boos and scattered applause. He started to sing in German now. The abuse increased, some loud heckling thrown in, but he didn’t stop singing. The crowd grew bored, and they let him sing his song. 

Beside George, Liebgott watched the singer with an unreadable expression on his face. Serious. Maybe he’d turned maudlin instead of George. George nudged him. He thought he was going to ask him if he was tired too, but instead he said, “What’s he singing about?”

Liebgott didn’t move, his face drawn, still and listening. When he did move, it was abrupt and quick, as if interrupted from some deep reverie. “What?”

“I said what’s the guy singing about?”

A flicker passed over Lieb’s face, and George didn’t know how to read that either. Maybe he didn’t know how to read anyone or anything. He was illiterate. He was drunk. “Oh, nothing,” Liebgott said. He was looking at George now instead of the singer, looking at George the same way he had looked at him. “It’s a dumb love song, is all.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Additional content notes: references and discussion of Nazi concentration camps, particularly Landsberg, are included in this chapter. Further, the threesome scene is largely an exercise in proxy sex and does contain implications and/or references to prostitution as well as internalized homophobia.


	4. Joigny

“ _—and he ain’t gonna jump no more!”_ Each word was punctuated with the bang of a too-full pint of ale against the bar top. George whooped and hollered, pink-faced and drunk. The Japanese had surrendered. The war was finally over.

The end of summer was paired with the end of the war, and their celebration was real and total. They were as rowdy as they’d been the night they had earned their wings, and near as drunk. It was all smiles and kisses for the French locals, joy swamped with the wild relief they wouldn’t be shipping off to the Pacific. They still had their time to bide before formal discharge, but—it was over. 

Tonight was a night for noise and riotous partying. Any tribute to the men gone was offered privately and silently. George knew now: you never stopped missing them, you simply found a different place inside yourself to put them, slotted tight alongside your grief. Buck had come by the camp recently, alive and well. Looked just like his old self but for a bit around the eyes. There was still a sadness there, but he covered it well when he grinned, wide and familiar. Recovered.

“You come to see what the final chapter looks like? Skip right to the end?” This was before the Japanese surrender, and ribbing Buck felt as natural as anything. Buck seemed to agree, if the smile that lit up his face was to be believed. He threw his arm around George’s neck in a gesture that was more chokehold than embrace. 

“More like I wanted to come make sure you boys wouldn’t trip over yourselves crossing the finish line.”George had laughed. Seeing him felt a lot like releasing a breath he hadn’t been aware he was holding. And then, much like too many of them, like Malark and Lip, Buck had moved along, that much closer to civilian life. 

And here they were now, in France. At the end of it all. 

Tab slung an arm along George’s shoulders, swaying and singing. George joined him, shouting more than singing, his words slurring and sliding into each other. “— _he ain’t gonna jump no more!_ ”

They had returned to France two weeks earlier. It was back to the old Army grind, their barracks housed in a tent city in north central France. They ended the war similar to how they started it: crammed into bunks on top of each other. They were in a holding pattern, everyone lax with relief but tense with impatience. 

That night, they were stuck with what passed for Army entertainment. George groaned as the familiar opening credits for _Seven Sinners_ flickered over the screen. 

“Oh my god, not this again,” he whined. He tried to catch the attention of the men seated around him, but they all studiously ignored him. They focused instead on the words, “with JOHN WAYNE,” big and bright before them. “You know who all’s served in the United States Army? Do you know? Because I do. Frank Capra. William Wyler. John Huston. George Stevens. John goddamn Ford. All those fellas, big names, but you expect me to believe the only film reel those assholes at battalion can get their hands on is _this_? I think not.”

“Shut up, Luz,” Skinny said, seated beside him. He didn’t even bother looking at George, just continued to stare with resignation at the screen and Marlene Dietrich. 

George elbowed him in the side. “You already seen this!”

Skinny elbowed him back. “Yeah, well, I’d rather listen to it than you.”

George held up his hands. “I cry foul play, that’s all.”

“Just watch the fucking movie, George.” Liebgott this time. George spun around in his chair. Liebgott was slouched low in his own seat, his fingers clutched around a cigarette held to his mouth. His eyes gleamed in the low light from the projector in the dark tent, his face obscured slightly by smoke. He was both looking at George and not, like he’d somehow managed to be in two places at once. That was a neat trick, and if George was ever alone with him again, he might ask him how he did it. 

“Et tu, Lieb?” Liebgott dropped his hand and his mouth parted in a scowl. He was looking square-on at him now. 

“What?”

Next to him, Web shook his head and laughed. “What?” Liebgott spat out again.

That was the thing: George was never alone with Liebgott. A solid nothing had happened between them since they left Austria. Even before they left. Weeks had passed with nothing more than the usual company bullshit. George had a good imagination, and he could both entertain himself and terrify himself accordingly. Much as what had happened back in Bastogne, he could almost convince himself that nothing had ever happened between him and Joe. Almost. He would be brought back to reality each time he made the mistake of catching Liebgott’s eye. Across the mess tent, the mud tracked field, their barracks, and the invented alternative— _nothing_ —became little more more than a foolish thought to be scrapped. There was foolishness to be found in this too, George was certain, these brief moments that made time feel as if it could be caught and held still. But then George had always exceeded when it came to damn fool ideas. 

Friday evening found George racked out on his bunk, attempting some semblance of a very much belated letter to his mother (the contents of which currently stood solely at, _Dear Ma, France is very wet,_ while blank page stretched beneath). He laid on his back, lulled by the patter of unceasing rain against the canvas tent, a cigarette precariously perched on the shelf of his bottom lip. His knees were bent, the page held there to write, clumsily, against his thigh. 

A kick to the leg of his cot shook both him and the pen against the page, the tip tearing straight through the paper and onto his ODs. He looked up with a scowl; “Goddamn, that any way to greet somebody?” The words were out before he registered who was standing over him. 

Liebgott was grinning, as if he enjoyed little more than getting a rise out of—well, anyone. Maybe specifically him. 

“We’re heading out, me and the fellas. Figured there wasn't a chance in hell you were gonna miss the opportunity to mooch a beer or two off us.”

“How dare you, questioning my honor like that,” but George was grinning now, too.

Liebgott kicked at his cot again. Caked mud flaked off his boot. “Then get the fuck up, princess.” 

George did as he was told. Not because he was told to, not really, he didn’t think he was that obediently brain-damaged by his time in the Army, but because Liebgott had a way about him of phrasing any old request as a demand. It was hard to say no to that. Or, it was just hard to say no to Lieb. 

They took advantage of their weekend passes and sought out the nearest bar, same as they had spent the majority of their previous weekend passes in England and in Austria. And they drank, and George did convince Popeye to spot him two rounds, and they all too quickly reached that point in the night when everyone went their own way—either to their own bed or to someone else’s. 

Liebgott’s grip was tight on George’s shoulder as he first held him back and then as he steered him out of the bar and into the street. A theory began to formulate in George’s head, which was always a dangerous proposition. He had spent so long waiting for something to happen, behaving as if there was a SOP to follow even off the line—that if anything more was to happen between the both of them it would be because of someone else, because of Lieb, not George. When it would happen, it would be with the same suddenness of an artillery attack, compete with, he thought wryly, absolute terror and explosion. It wouldn’t be because of him; he would bear no responsibility. 

It was happening now, he was pretty sure of it. Joe didn’t say anything as they walked, his grip still tight along George’s elbow as if escorting him to the brig, so George filled the silence with his own slightly drunken, definitely inane chatter. He recognized the cathouse as they reached the door. He’d never been before, but he’d heard more than his fair share about this place at mess to know it was well-frequented by fellow GIs stationed here in France. He tried to ignore the nervous drop in his stomach, his mouth dry. He thought of Austria, the woman between the both of them, the memory was well-worn as a frequently held photograph.

Joe stepped over the threshold, confident and knowing, obvious this wasn’t his first time here. George flushed with something he didn’t know hot to categorize, so he didn’t. He continued to follow Joe. And he wasn’t surprised, he told himself, when Joe disappeared for several minutes, nor when he came back with a scantily-clad woman on his arm.

“I thought we could have some fun. If you’re interested,” Joe said.

She didn’t say anything, just had that flat-eyed look, like she wasn’t impressed with them. That she hadn’t been impressed in a good long time. _Three’s a crowd_ , wasn’t that what Joe had said the last girl said? George didn’t have the strength in him to repeat it. To say that, maybe, what he wanted was just the two of them, alone. Instead, he followed Joe’s lead. It was easy enough when it was Joe calling the shots.

“Uh, yeah,” was all George managed to say before his voice cracked. Joe’s mouth stretched, feline and pleased, as if he could see straight into George’s head and, as a result, every dumb thing that lived in there. 

He wondered if among all that Joe could see it, sense it, that friction of wanting something and feeling too afraid to do anything about it. When you were bogged down by the uncertainty of what the other person felt for you, what you felt for that other person. There was a lot that was truly, just, absolutely fucked when it came to war, but the one thing George had appreciated was the clarity. Ours or theirs, forward or retreat. Alive or dead. You did as you were told. You didn’t have to question anything, or, at least, you weren’t supposed to. He followed Joe and the girl down the hall, and he did not know where to begin with each and every doubt and curiosity that prickled up his spine.

“Sit in the chair.” That was what Joe said, once the door was shut behind them.

There was a chair, set against the wall before the foot of the bed, close enough to the brass bed frame in need of a generous polishing.

Joe was behaving like he was the director of a picture here, placing George and the girl where he wanted them. The girl was on the bed, on her knees, facing George with that same expression on her face that said little more than, _I am biding my time, please hurry up_. It was far from stimulating, but George knew—even if admitting it to even himself felt too much like performing surgery on his own body, plucking at vital organs, rearranging them, wrist-deep in his own guts and blood—this wasn’t about her. She was their plausible deniability. 

The bed springs squeaked as Joe climbed onto the mattress, settling behind her.

“What? You get all the action?” George said, even as he did as he was told. He took a seat. 

“I did all the work getting us here, didn’t I?” And even though his tone was as chiding and combative as he usually was, from casual conversation to actual confrontation, it felt so bizarrely wrong here, least of all as Joe began to undress. There wasn't any hesitation to him, like this was something they did all the time. He pushed his trousers down below his hipbones, scythe-like and sharp beneath pale skin, followed by his skivvies. George sat there, dumbstruck or maybe just dick-struck. He’d decided that had to be a thing, it was the only way to explain his ever worsening preoccupation where it came to one Joseph D. Liebgott. “Don’t worry, you’ll get yours.”

George sat back in the chair and continued to watch. George had assumed it would be like last time, the both of them together, the girl as a buffer between them. Instead, he watched as Joe slipped a rubber on and just as unceremoniously slipped his cock inside of her. George couldn’t tell you how she reacted or what she did—he was only watching him. He watched him fuck her, his own dick twitching uncomfortably in his pants, too tight and trapped against the crease of his thigh.

George never did have a lot of patience, let alone any. It only seemed fair, a tit-for-tat settling of scores, for him to reach into his own pants. His neck felt hot, all of him hot, as Joe continued to fuck her. As George fucked his own fist. He met Joe’s eye only the once, and even that felt more than he could handle. His stomach clenched, a brief tremor through his thigh, and for one perilous heartbeat he feared he was already about to shoot. Instead he took a deep breath. Instead, he fixed his gaze on the rhythm of Joe’s hips, hard and quick; that made him ache, too. He let his head drop back against the peeling wallpaper. He let himself wish that he had a better angle, that he could see his dick enter her with each push of his hips, and what the fuck. There was alarm, somewhere in the background, beneath everything he wanted. Because of what he wanted. It was right there in front of him, and all he could touch was himself. 

Small, pathetic noises began to escape his mouth; he was already that close. If he wanted any dignity, what he needed was a hand clamped over it; the hand his mind conjured was dirty and cold and smelled like gun oil, wet with snow. It only brought him that much faster to the edge, and then Joe spoke.

“Stop.” It took a moment for George to parse that Joe meant him, not the girl. His hand hadn’t caught up with his mind or his ears yet and he kept pulling at his dick. “I said, stop. You don’t come, not until I tell you.”

“Fuck you, General Patton,” George said, but there wasn't any heat to it, more of a whine than anything else. Still, he obeyed. How was that for Army discipline. He stopped touching himself. Both of his hands gripped the loose fabric of his trousers, as if he needed something to hold onto.

“Not until I let you,” Joe was saying, his voice gone wheezy and out of breath. “I’m gonna make you come, George.” George’s head dropped back against the wall again on a groan or a moan or both. His dick leaked against his stomach. It took an incredible amount of willpower he frankly did not know he had not to reach down, take himself back in hand.

“Ah, fuck.”

Joe finished shortly after, the poor girl’s head pushed down to the mattress. His entire body jerked and he released a wordless gasping exhale. He was looking straight at George. It didn’t take a genius—which George had been told on at least a dozen occasions he most certainly was not—to get the play here. George wasn’t stupid. It wasn't the girl Joe was fucking.

Joe dismissed her after, just like the other time they had done this, and then they were left with the empty quiet of the room. George could hear the rest of the house around them. He distantly wondered if he’d ever get used to being alone again or if he was always gonna need someone else in a room with him in order to feel anything close to safe. He didn’t think that was what he was supposed to be thinking about right now. He shifted his gaze from the door back to Joe. 

Joe was watching him closely. “You gotta tell me you want this, George.” Even with the rough, reedy scrape of his voice, he still somehow managed to sound unflappable. 

“That’s not fucking obvious enough for you?” George gestured down at his dick, still hard if not woefully neglected. 

Joe laughed, quick and almost derisive. His hair was mussed, his face flushed. He was flushed down his neck to his narrow chest, all ribs and muscle, a goddamn anatomy lesson. “I wanna hear you say it.”

If left unchecked, George was getting the idea that Lieb might’ve made for one hell of a sadistic drill sergeant. 

“I want it.” When he didn’t say anything more, Joe nodded, small and expectant. Leading. George groaned. He ran his hands through his hair, made it stand on end, leaned back in his chair as if it was Joe pinning him back. “I want you to—I want you—come on, cut the shit. You know I want it. I’m sitting right here, aren’t I?”

“Take off your clothes.” Any further wry comments dried up in George’s mouth. He obeyed that order, too. 

“Lock the door, then get on the bed.” His heart beat rabbit fast as he did as he was told. When he turned back, when he approached the bed, he found Joe was naked now, too. Nothing new there, except for the context, really. And his own erection. Well, maybe except for everything. 

“What’re you gonna do to me?” George heard himself say. The mattress yielded under him, over-soft and most like overused. He felt more than a little pride that there was still a bit of snappy indignation left in his voice, beneath the pleading edge that dominated. 

Joe’s mouth split into a grin that would’ve sent the nuns rushing to lock the convent doors. George’s breath hitched. 

“Whatever the fuck I want.”

George glanced down at Joe’s dick, softened now against his thigh. It looked wet with his come. He thought about licking it, tasting it, taking it into his mouth. He wanted to do that. Both terror and hunger alike rushed through him, and without meaning to, he licked his lips. 

“That fucking mouth,” Joe said, and then he was pressing his own to it. 

Joe lunged up, kissing him harder. George pushed back, with body and lips and tongue. Kissing him felt like continuing a conversation they’d started ages ago but never finished. It felt right. The wet head of George’s cock smeared against Joe’s stomach. There wasn’t enough friction, nothing more than a cruel tease. When Joe got his hand on him, George made a truly ridiculous sound, a sob like he was gut shot. Joe’s hand was calloused and rough, his grip too dry and tight, but he was touching him. He was finally touching him. George jerked up into his grip. His overwhelm felt a lot like hysterical relief. It made his mouth crack open as he tried to breathe, say something unnecessary, but Joe’s mouth got in the way. The kiss went wide, clumsy and overeager. Their teeth knocked together, his chin wet with spit from Joe’s open mouth. They were rough, but there was a tenderness to it, as if that could only be found in defiance of anything gentle and kind.

“Don’t got anything to say now, huh, smart ass?”

There was no real rhythm to Joe’s hand, just a tight glide up and down, up and down. The muscles in George’s thighs and stomach had started to tremble. “Fuck you, Jesus Christ, fuck me.”

Joe shoved at his shoulder and George dropped back against the mattress. His elbows barely held him up as Joe followed him down. He knew what the weight of his body on his own felt like, but only in the dark. The lamp was still on, a scarf draped over it, casting the room in a warm red glow. It was overwhelming to see him like this. To be seen. He wanted to close his eyes, but he also needed to see it all. The heat in Joe’s face, the parted open mouth, everything about him brought right up to the surface, and George knew the same had to be true about him, too. 

Joe released his cock. Before George could protest, he felt his fingers. Joe traced down his balls, drawn tight up against his body. He traveled further, stopping just short of his hole, and fuck, maybe he wanted that, too. He didn’t know what he wanted, didn’t know what was allowed. What he was allowed to want. He wanted everything he could get. Joe must have noticed. He felt a sight pressure against his hole and George’s cock slapped against his stomach. It was Joe who groaned as George held himself tight and tense, desperate for this to last longer than he was probably capable of enduring. 

“You like that?” Joe said. For once, there was no goading, just piqued interest. George felt more pressure, nearly unbearable as the tip of his finger barely entered him. 

“Please,” George finally said, his hand latched onto Joe’s wrist.

Joe’s body was on his then, grinding and rutting against him, both of his hands holding George’s hips still. The first touch of their cocks together was nearly enough for George to shoot; he made a low punched-out noise from deep in his chest. He tried to lift his hips better under Joe’s weight, but even despite Joe’s narrowness, his sharpness, he was strong. Stronger. He held him down. George’s breathing was ragged and rough. He grabbed at any part of Joe he could touch, his grip white-knuckled and too tight. Tight enough to hurt. Joe didn't stop him. Joe was hard again, George could feel the weight and the heat of his cock pressed to the hollow of his hip, as he thrust against him. The force of their bodies working against and with each other, Joe pushing against him, brought them to the edge of the bed. George’s head all but hung off the mattress, made him feel weightless and vertiginous. Joe had released his hips, his hands dragging over his chest, his shoulders, his neck, any part of George he could touch. George shifted restlessly under him, bucking up against Joe. Joe kept saying, “yeah, yeah,” breathless and pleased against the side of George’s face, his jaw, into his ear, down the length of his bared throat. George was babbling, saying something about how he needed it, he needed to come, Joe needed to touch him goddamnit, he couldn’t take it. And then Joe’s hand was finally on him again, too much sensation to keep track of, to be present of, and George came, wet over Joe’s fist. 

Joe didn’t stop—he continued to work himself against George. With a hard swallow, still feeling emptied and sluggish and pleasingly used, George reached down between them. He finally touched him. George had never touched another man like this before, and his own post-orgasm haze mixed with something else, something that felt a lot like inevitability. He fulfilled all those idle thoughts that he could trace back on a map through most of Europe, every place they had traveled together to get to here. That was all it took. Joe dropped his head as George’s hand worked clumsily over his cock. George’s eyes were open, Joe’s neck right there before him. He could see the scar below his ear from where he was hit at the crossroads back in Holland. It had healed neatly enough, still raised though, an obvious mark from violence. George pressed his mouth to it, tasted the skin and the scar tissue with his tongue, and he twisted his hand the same way he liked it when he jerked himself off. That was it, and Joe was coming over his curled fingers. 

“Fucking,” George started to say but he stopped there. 

He rolled himself away from Joe, out from under him, and the mattress sagged beneath his weight. He couldn’t get his breath to settle out. He still felt like he was going at it full-tilt, heart banging against the wall of his chest. Like he was being chased, trying to outrun someone. Something. He laid there very still, a hand held over his eyes. He could hear Liebgott rustling around and then the _snick_ and flare of a lighter. He smelled the nicotine and the smoke. George dropped his hand and looked over at Liebgott, reclining there naked with his cigarette like maybe he thought he was some kind of pin-up. 

“You done this with guys before?” The question was out before his brain, addled as it was in the best of times, gave it any clearance. 

That it was a mistake was as immediate and obvious as the shift in Joe, disappointingly so. Even though both of them were still naked, Joe might as well have slipped on a suit of armor he was that guarded. Ready to fight. 

“Does it matter?”

“Well, yeah. A little.”

He looked at George. His eyes narrowed, more than a little cruelty there. “What are you trying to do? Make this romantic? Make it special? We’re killing time, is all. Jesus.”

George got to his feet. He lunged for his rumpled trousers, his undershirt. He felt the need to cover himself. “Fuck you, Joe.”

“Too late, George.” He was mocking him, using the same tone of voice as George had.

George had pulled his pants up over his hips but he hadn’t fastened them. He whirled back to face him, open fly. He pulled his undershirt down over his chest. “What’re _you_ doing, huh? I’m trying to have a conversation here and you gotta go, you gotta be you—” Anything more he had to say dropped off into a frustrated sigh. He scrubbed a hand over his face then sighed again, resigned this time. “I haven’t, okay? I haven’t.”

Something crossed over Joe’s face George had no idea he would spend the better part of his life remembering. It was a minor thing, both in the course of their history and an even smaller footnote in the history of the war. But it was intimate, that was what George would recall, the way his face folded as some deeply dredged emotion came to the surface, only for Joe to immediately try to bury it. It was still there though, barely visible around his mouth, his eyes. 

“Well. You’re a natural, Luz.” 

George stood there, his hands on his hips. He felt his mouth go flat and firm as he stared him down. He forced himself quiet as he waited him out. 

“You ain’t my first,” Joe said, slow. “But I’m not,” he added, much quicker, stopping himself from any further incrimination. 

“No,” George said, just as quickly. As defensive. “No.” He wasn’t either.

George hadn’t slept in going on twenty-four hours. This was back in Haguenau, back in what felt like an entire lifetime ago. A world away rather than the same country they occupied now. He was punch-drunk tired. He would get like this with the guys often, his mouth running, brain turned off, and most of them knew to just let him keep going. He’d tired himself out eventually. Hit that wall. Crash. 

George wasn’t with the guys though—he was at CP. Lip was laid out on the sofa, against Speirs’s orders, lightly dozing. Evening was coming on, the sky shading into a darker gray beneath the static layer of smoke and heavy cloud cover. George manned the radio. Speirs reviewed paperwork, each sheet thrown down as if it had committed a particularly grave offense against him beyond wasting his time. Despite that, the room was calm, quiet. Like if George wanted to, he could say anything. So, of course, he did. 

“Earlier today, y'know, I found myself getting to thinking, and I know, I know, thinking ain’t any dumb thing an enlisted man such as myself should be getting up to, least of all with a war on and what have you, but there I was, thinking my thoughts to myself, but it was—it was like they weren’t my own? You ever feel that way? Like maybe you went and forgot yourself somewhere?” His face pulled into a frown. He looked at neither Lip nor Speirs but rather the radio unit before him, as if he was trying to communicate beyond this room or this house or this war, court a loftier and more divine response. “Like, you, I don’t know—mislaid yourself. You put yourself down some place and you forgot to pick you back up again. You just kept going, but without yourself. You ever feel that?” He was talking unlike himself, real slow and low, as if maybe he really had forgotten himself somewhere. Maybe it wasn’t even in one single place but several, scattered the same way a man did when hit—body exploding, bits of him tossed out like food for the birds. Maybe that was George now, and he was gonna have to go ahead and put the pieces back together, call himself a person again somehow, even in the absence of who he thought he knew himself to be. 

Lip inhaled. It sounded like it took some work, and then broke into a snore, hardly gentle. Speirs threw down another page, his endorsement scrawled across the bottom. “No,” he said.

George shrugged. He hadn’t actually expected an answer. He took a long drag off his cigarette, burnt low enough his fingertips brushed against his cold mouth. “I don’t think I like it.” He stubbed it out. “The me without me.”

Another flutter of pages. “Are you still talking over there, Luz?”

“No, sir.”

In Joigny, fall was upon them. With it came cold and drizzling rain, constant mud that sucked at their boots. George milled around outside his tent, smoking. Dusk had enveloped the camp quickly, dark arriving far too early. He was restless. Sure, they were off the hook. No threat, no blade hanging over their head that their asses would be tossed out a plane over some island in the Pacific. Didn’t do a damn thing for the boredom though. George hated a lot of things, but he especially hated the idea of being cooped up here for a second more. 

He heard approaching, squelching, footsteps. There was no stealth maneuvering out here, not with all that pitted mud. He glanced over his shoulder. It was Liebgott. 

“Didn’t see you at chow,” Joe said by way of greeting. 

George didn’t have much of anything to say to that. He looked up at the sky, wondered when the rain would start coming down harder. “Unlike you schmucks, I had myself a reservation at a finer establishment,” he said. It came out less like a joke and more like grousing from around his damp cigarette. Liebgott made some kind of snickering noise that George supposed passed for a laugh. He reached without comment, took the cigarette from George. They shared it, again without further comment. For all the talking they’d done over the past three years, it felt like they were saying more to each other now, silently, passing that cigarette back and forth. 

“I’m pretty sure I hate France,” George finally said, desperate to say anything. “Fucking hate it. Looking forward to a fine one-finger salute once I’ve got this muddy heap in my rearview. Hell, I don’t even wanna hear shit about France when I get home. A waiter tries to offer me chicken française? I’ll fucking lose it.”

“You done?” There it was, that casual impatience to Liebgott’s voice. George looked past him, out at the rest of the camp.

“I should fucking hate you, too.”

“Me? The fuck I do?”

“Christ.” George willed himself to meet Joe’s eye. He was no coward; he was many things but not that, so he did. Their fingers brushed as they passed off the cigarette between them. George slipped it back between his lips—he thought of Joe’s mouth, so he looked at that, too. “I’m crawling out of my goddamn skin here. All I think about, all I _can_ think about—all I fucking want,” and he sputtered. He stopped, thought briefly about collecting himself, then charged ahead anyway. He only made it through one word—“ _You’re_ ,”—full of all the exasperation he possessed before he stopped himself again. He thought that showed both self-restraint and self-preservation, two things he typically had in short reserve if he ever had at all. He tried to go back to thinking of things he hated, dumb things, inconsequential. How much he hated French mud and Perconte’s snoring, how he hated his perpetually wet socks, and the slop this camp went ahead and dared called edible. Not Liebgott’s mouth on the cigarette they both smoked, not the question that had dogged his steps since their last weekend pass. Would they go home before anything could happen between them again? That was precisely what he was trying not to think about. 

“Yeah,” Liebgott said. George couldn’t decide if he was reaching for his cigarette or for George’s mouth. Joe’s thumb brushed the bottom swell of George’s lip before he pulled back, empty-handed. “I know.”

“If you don’t get on with it, I swear to god, Lieb.”

“Yeah? You’ll do what?”

They had cut out the middle man. Middle woman, if George wanted to be exact. Weekend passes now found them in a nondescript room above a nearby pub. Joe had been the one to scout out the location, procure the key, make whatever discreet arrangement he had established with the barkeep downstairs. George didn’t ask. Like everything else about this, it was on Joe’s terms. And so, per those terms, the room above the pub became their go-to, where they escaped to when the opportunity presented itself.

Like now. 

Joe had George on all fours on the rickety bed and George pushed back against a decidedly deliberate and slow-moving Joe. “I don’t think you’re gonna do anything,” Joe said. He smoothed a hand down George’s back, already damp with sweat even if the room, more garret than anything, was vastly under-heated. George dropped his head and breathed heavily. The gesture was a near tender thing. 

It was moments like this when what Joe had said they were doing before— _just killing time_ —didn’t seem to hold water. Not here. Not between them and not the longer they carried on. George knew what fucking was, just fucking, as if sport, same as the cards played before you went upstairs and got down to business. For as enjoyably fulfilling as any of that could be, it was still empty. Same as one of the waxy chocolate bars when what you needed was a good meal. 

George felt the sharp brush of teeth over the back of his shoulder, dragged up towards his neck. He shivered. Hissed as blunt teeth dug in. “Come on, fuck you. You gonna make me have to explain this again?”

Joe was a goddamn biter; based on the way he’d grin, George should’ve known he’d be all teeth. A wet tongue laved over the throbbing spot where his teeth had been. It wouldn’t be the first time Joe left him with marks. A couple weeks back, George caught hell from the guys when Perco called him out. The collar of his undershirt did nothing to hide the bruised skin Joe had left him with, right there, purpled and mean-looking, at the base of his throat. 

“Take a look at you—you been making time with a vampire, Luz?”

“Busted,” was all George said. He hadn’t even bothered with a Dracula impression, though he had tacked on a wide and sheepish grin. At the time, he’d made a point not to glance across their barracks at Joe, as if ownership could be claimed, obvious and indefensible, if he did.

George had never been good with keeping a secret. Day by day, he could feel this one expanding inside him, alongside his lungs, spreading his ribcage, taking up vital space. Like any day they would wake up and all they’d find left behind was the secret itself, George gone. Consumed. That, or the secret would find a way to escape up his throat and out of his mouth, blurted to the worst audience he could find, and then everything would be ruined. With little else to occupy their waking hours and their worries, that was what he thought about. He could just see himself, leaning over and looking Cobb dead in the eye, saying to him, “I’m fucking Joe, or he’s fucking me, we’re fucking each other, just thought you should know,” and then watching where the damage fell. 

Thank Christ, he had better survival instincts than that. They kept what they did to themselves, and they only did this here. It was too risky anywhere else, and if pressed, George would say he was done courting any risk for a good while now. Especially this. They never talked about any of it, unless they were in the act. And even then, it was all push and pull, the sort of shit a man should know better than to trust, his dick talking more than his mouth. Sometimes, though. Well, sometimes. He’d look at Liebgott across the tent that served as their barracks. He’d see him settling down with his morning chow, the stretch of his mouth as he ate, and he wanted him so stupidly bad he could’ve slapped himself. That was dopey behavior right there. You didn’t go dopey over the buddy you were screwing in the attic room over a grimy French bar.

He suspected his survival instincts might not extend that far. He was already long gone on that front. 

The first time Joe took him up to this room, the first time they were truly alone, George came near immediately. They barely got the door shut before Joe had his hand down the front of his trousers, and that was it, George made a mess of himself. Joe laughed at him, self-satisfied and more than a little smug. George didn’t think he had that much higher ground to stand on, especially when it took just as minimal an effort to undo him. His pants were bunched around his knees as George awkwardly, but not without bravado, pulled at him until Joe was quickly red-faced and snarling his completion. 

In the dim privacy of that room, George got an education. He learned what he liked from what Joe would give him. Like his mouth, his fingers. George had had a girl’s mouth around his dick before, but the feel of Joe’s on him, the scrape of stubble against the soft skin of his inner thigh, the depthless hot clutch of his throat—it was entirely new and incomparable. While he sucked at him, Joe thrust fruitlessly against the thin mattres. He paused at one point to reach down, to squeeze himself. The sight he made, the flushed face, sweaty, as overwhelmed as George himself, was nearly as satisfying as his tight mouth around him. Nearly. George completely lost it when Joe worked a spit-slick finger into him, the feel of him inside him equal parts foreign and mind-numbingly good. 

George told himself it was nothing to return the favor in kind. Like most else they got up to in private, George had never done this before. He took to it the way he did everything else since he enlisted: with great enthusiasm and without an ounce of self-consciousness. He gripped Joe’s cock at the base and sucked on the head, his wide mouth wet and open, down the length of him. He mimicked what Joe had done to him and what he knew he liked from experience. He took too much too quickly, gagged noisily and then coughed. He pulled off him, coughing again, as Joe murmured some kind of nonsense encouragement, his hand still curled tight in George’s hair. George’s mouth went lower, guided by a lethal combination of curiosity and want, as he licked over his balls. His fingers probed behind them, as Joe had done for him. He rested his cheek against Joe’s thigh, his throat raw and scratchy. The muscle there trembled against his face, and he asked if Joe liked fingers too, if he wanted him inside him. Joe bucked but he didn’t answer, just made a high-pitched sound like a whine trapped in his throat. George smoothed his hand over that jumping muscle in his thigh and he pushed his legs farther apart, operating on instinct. “I said, you want my fingers in you?” George said, and Joe said yes, he said please, which made George want to laugh; he must want it that bad. 

“Get them wet first,” Joe said. George did him one better: he licked a trail from behind his balls to his hole. He tentatively lapped there, added more pressure when Joe reacted as if he’d struck him—body tense, fists curled, a cut-off shout. Joe cursed him out as George kept at it, his grip turning bruising and mean along the back of Joe’s thigh, holding him open. It was nothing like eating a woman, but pleasurable in its own way. Pleasurable because of how Joe took it, gasping and squirming, pulling at George’s hair hard enough to make his eyes water. When he finally worked his thumb in him, Joe clenched around it immediately. He returned his mouth to his cock, pressing a wet kiss on the head of it, nearly chaste but for the fact it was his mouth and Joe’s cock. 

“Christ, you’re a fast learner,” Joe said after he came, each word labored as his chest rose and fell. 

Now, Joe was the one with his mouth on him, his fingers digging into the meat of his ass as he spread him open to him. Too often they treated this like a competition, as if each time the other came was a point scored in their name. Joe continued to work him open, first with lips and tongue and then his fingers, curling, unhurried, well-aware now of how to light George up from the inside out. Some nights, Joe would go demanding and rushed, every part of George sore for a good day or so after. Other nights were like tonight: slow and almost lazy, a patient exploration that George knew would eventually end the same as the other nights did: desperate and rough and George most like begging into the thin mattress for anything he could get. 

Joe liked when George would beg, and of course he fucking would. The first time Joe did this to him, tongue and fingers slipped inside of him, the immediate overwhelm was almost intolerably good. George buried his face in the cradle of his arms as he made open-mouthed, humiliating noises that Joe urged on. It wasn’t the first time he came like that, prick untouched. Before all this, George hadn’t even know that _that_ was something a man could want. Now he did and he wanted. It led to the obvious: George wanted him to fuck him.

“Jesus, give you an inch, you run a mile.” It wasn’t a real complaint. George had learned that, too. Joe, and his defenses, some more hastily and sloppily constructed than others. Most of them George knew his way past.

Joe might’ve been the more experienced of the two of them, but George was the more unabashed. He reached down between them and took Joe in hand. George’s mouth twisted as he felt the twitching pulse of him. Despite his complaining, his dick was more than a little inclined. 

“Settle down. I’m just asking for a few inches, not a goddamn mile.”

That first time was clumsy. It fucking hurt, surprising in how much. Joe’s cock stretched him, George burning with it, deep and uncomfortable, as if his entire body had to be rearranged to take him. Joe had warned him—“It might not feel so good”—and George hadn’t believed him. 

They were better at it now. George’s thighs shook with the effort of holding himself up on hands and knees as Joe pushed into him. Joe gripped tight at the junction of shoulder and neck, his fingers digging into the aching bruise he bit there, before he hauled George up against him. After that first time, like anything else, it got easier. It got better. They got rougher with each other. Sometimes, when Joe fucked him like this, he barely had to touch him. Just his length in him, his body pushing against his, as if he could crowd him forward until the only option George had was to spend over himself. 

After, they lay side-by-side, sweating, smoking. Their limbs uncomfortably stuck to each other. George felt empty-headed, fucked stupid, so maybe that was why he asked Joe, “Do you like it too?”

He wasn’t looking at Liebgott, but he could hear his facial expression in his voice: high incredulity and raised eyebrows. “What, fucking you? You digging for compliments here, George?”

George snorted. “No, no. Though all praise should be directed to my agent via fan mail. No—I was. Do you like getting fucked too?” He didn’t know why he wanted to know what he wanted to know. He knew Joe liked George’s fingers, his mouth. But he felt there remained a gap between the two of them, both in experience and in understanding each other. 

Joe didn’t say anything, not yet. They didn’t really talk much, not about this. Sure, they’d say what they wanted, comment on how bad the other wanted it, wanted him, earnest dirty talk without an ounce of finesse. And they’d talk after, laid in that narrow bed together, but only the same sort of talk they’d have back in the barracks. Company gossip, mainly, small and random bits of their own lives, what was waiting for them back stateside. Joe always got like this, hesitant, when it came to talking about fucking after he was spent. It surprised and baffled George each time. The second Joe’s dick was even slightly aroused, all bets were off with what he had to say, but the moment after he came? He clammed right up. George didn’t get it. Maybe it was because George never knew when to shut up. Maybe it was because he was a stranger to shame. Or, maybe, it was because George firmly believed everything that happened here was a secret. If no one knew, how could there be anything to be ashamed of? Sometimes he thought it ran deeper than that, a more existential question. George lifted a hand to the livid bite mark on his neck. He pressed into it, sent a hot shock through his body. How could he be ashamed of anything that felt so good? 

Joe still hadn’t answered his question. He really was exhausting, in every sense of the word. George turned his head, half-expecting to find him sacked out, actually asleep or feigning it to get out of further conversation. But Joe’s eyes were open and he was looking at George, like maybe it was George who was inscrutable and impossible and not the other way around. 

“Yeah,” Joe finally said. “I do. I have.” Five words, and each were said as if George had dropped a fish hook down his throat and drawn each up slowly and with a great deal of struggle. After everything Joe was willing to do to him, to have George do to him, he still made George have to pry any intel about his sexual history or preferences like it cost him something. 

“Do you want me to, next time?” He couldn’t figure out if the funny look on Joe’s face was from the offer wholesale or the mention, the promise, of a next time. 

“Do you want to?”

George rolled his eyes. He looked up at the stained ceiling and he smoked. Joe Liebgott 101: deflecting with indignant questions when you didn’t want to answer. George turned his head, his hair rustling against the dingy pillowcase, and looked back over at him. Joe’s chest was still warmed and pink, tacky with sweat. 

“Well, yeah. I wouldn’t’ve asked otherwise.”

“You wanna fuck me?”

George snorted. “Hold your horses. Don’t act all shocked. I can’t think of a goddamn thing I don’t wanna do to you.”

Joe’s face shuttered against him even has his mouth tipped up into a small smile. 

Outside the window, morning was struggling to rise against the gray cloud cover. They’d have to head out soon. They did more scouting and recon work arranging these rendezvous than they did for anything else in their Army detail now. 

Joe didn’t say anything more. His eyes were closed and his breathing even and George believed he really might be asleep. The problem with George was he was always running his mouth. Always the better part of a country mile ahead of his brain. He always played his hand, thinking the deck would always be in his favor. The problem, he knew, was he gave away a lot of himself without thinking.

Like all things, including both war and peace, they reached the end.

They spent the final weekend pass they had in Paris. They had no idea that Paris was the end. But, then, that was how it always worked—you never knew when the end was coming. Half the time, it was already here. 

Looking back, George would reshape the memory into a knowing encounter. That they both knew when they reported back to CP they’d get the news that by month’s end they’d be back on American shores. They were going home. What actually transpired was something different, both from his memory and from all the other times spent in that tiny upstairs room. He did not care to articulate how.

But, Paris—a few of the guys went, finally got themselves there. It was fine. The City of Light was still fairly dark, probably a better city before the war, but beggars and choosers and all that. The novelty of the war had long worn off, and they weren’t exactly heralded as the arriving heroes they might’ve been a year prior. They went mostly ignored, blended in with the other GIs running through the city. They were all of the opinion that French food was terrible; French wine, on the other hand—

“ _Salut_!” Perconte called, a refilled glass lifted. 

By the end of the night, George was alone with Joe. They fucked in a cheap Paris hotel room like some kind of parody of great romance. Joe reclined back on the bed. He hauled George into his lap, George’s thighs bracketed on either side of his. 

George thought of those films, watched over and over again on base, John Wayne in his borrowed whites and his dame and her goddamn penny, and how that was supposed to be romantic. Didn’t seem like much of anything to him at all, not after the baker’s dozen viewing of it. He wouldn’t call this romantic either, how he reacted to Joe, how Joe reacted to him. He still thought of that as war, what it did to people like them. What men could do to each other. What they could want from each other. 

All the same, George couldn’t stop it—he started to laugh, and then he kept laughing. 

“What?” Joe spat out. He pulled back from him

“I’m not,” George started to say. He was going to tell him that he wasn’t laughing at him. Instead he dragged a hand through Joe’s hair, pulled his head back and bared his throat. He watched the bob of it as he swallowed. Thought about licking down the length of it, biting it. Thought about a lot of things even if he didn’t do them. Even if he wasn’t going to get the time. George laughed again, but it was quieter this time, still warm. Not unkind. He pushed his weight against him. “It’s goddamn ridiculous, is all.” 

“What? That I’m not with someone better looking than you?” 

In the back of his mind, he had always known there wasn’t much time to carry on like this. George hadn’t realized at first how he had been living, the last three years, as if trying to outrun a ticking clock. He felt it more acutely the last couple of weeks, aware that each day forward was one day closer to discharge, closer to home. Closer to the end.

It occurred to him as Joe bore down on him that they were never going to talk about whatever this was, not really. It would live only by happenstance, near accidental. Another casualty of war. Another thing lost. They would return to camp and then they would return to their separate ends of the country, as if they needed all of America to exist between them if they were to survive in peace time.

“Sure,” George said, gentle as anything, if only for a syllable. “That.”

Easy Company waited on the airfield. This was Upottery, summer. The jump into Normandy was all but upon them. They were green, and they didn’t even know it. Too many of them were dead, and they didn’t know that either. They smeared their faces with greasepaint, they finished packing up; the additional weight made George freeze up more than nerves ever could. 

A hand clapped down on his arm. George grinned up at the face smirking down at him—Lieb. 

“You all set there, Luz?”

“I’d say so. Got enough gear here strapped to me, make sure even if I could fly I’m gonna sink like a stone instead.”

“You scared?” He asked it like a challenge, near to a schoolyard taunt. Liebgott’s mouth screwed up into a crooked smile. 

Of course he was fucking scared. But he mimicked Liebgott, he grabbed onto his arm and he gave it a rough squeeze. “Nah. We’re men of great adventure, aren’t we?”

The troopship waited in the harbor before him. Bound for New York; he was out. 

“You think it’ll be as we left it?” Christenson said on the train out of France. There was a nervousness, not just to him but to all of them, as if they were headed not for home but to the front again. George could remember a similar energy of the truck convoy he had ridden in, nearly a year ago, as they headed to the edge of the Ardennes. They were cold and they were tired before the fight had even begun, but there was still that bright anxious energy, fear manifesting through jokes and laughter. He understood now, in a way, what maybe Perconte had been trying to say, back in that forest in Landsberg. If you went looking for it, you could find reminders of anything hard you survived everywhere around you. 

George shrugged. “Buildings’ll still be standing, roads still laid out, Ford making cars. Only thing that mighta changed is your girl wised up and found herself a greener pasture to graze in.”

“I ain’t gonna miss you, pal.”

“Don’t lie to your good friend George. You just might hurt my feelings.”

And then they were at the dock and George was looking at his ride home. He’d expected to be happier about it. George looked back behind him. He was met with the what remained of the 101st, rendered anonymous in matching uniforms, too far away to make out any distinguishing features. He allowed himself a brief moment of melancholy—he let himself give into it, just for now. The space of a breath. There was always something else, just out of reach. You won the battle, but not the war. You won the war, but not the world. Now, you had to live in it, even if you feared you no longer fit. Ain’t that the way of it. 

He exhaled, he turned. He looked forward. The war was over, he reminded himself. He was going home.


	5. San Francisco

The city was cool this time of year and George regretted coming. The regret was brief, a fleeting, fickle thing, that he suspected stood defensively in place of something worse. Nerves, perhaps. He shrugged both off like a heavier coat he wished that he was wearing. It was spring, 1952, George a civilian for a solid six years. 

George took his time; he let himself get lost in the city, walked one unfamiliar block after another, up hills and down. He ducked into a bar on Market Street for a mid-day pint. Hitched a ride on a cable car when he grew tired. Smoked the entire way, unhurried as he wandered. A well-creased letter resided in his left breast pocket. 

At last, when he had either worked up his courage or exhausted his patience, he asked for directions.

_December 14, 1949_

_Joe,_

_You’re either dead or you faked us out for a good three years and couldn’t read a goddamn thing, which explains why I never get word one out of you. Like talking to a wall, which, knowing you, tracks. Not even true winter yet out here in Providence, but it got real cold tonight. Weatherman’s saying we got a nor'easter on the way, batten down the hatches. I chose a right rotten place to make a life, least when it comes to the cold. My wife said to me this evening when I came in for supper I was acting like I was on the run, somebody chasing me. Said it was written all over my face, never seen my mouth go so sour. I laughed (she did_ _not_ _like that) and I suppose you could say it made me think of you. Turns out you weren’t wrong about me and my goddamn mouth._

_You won’t reply, and that’s fine (though believe me, you’ll be pleased to know, my ego suffers) and I hope you’re well, or at a minimum alive._ ~~_I suppose you could also say that this time of year and the weather’ll always_~~ _I plan to have another smoke and another drink and I’ll most like repeat until I stop thinking about_

_Your dumb friend,  
_ _George_

After he got out, he wrote letters. He wrote to everyone in Easy—bright, goofy missives, friendly and gabby, the same way he might speak to them should they be seated at the same table as him or across the room. He wrote letters to Joe, too. These he wrote only occasionally, typically brief, often what felt to be against his better judgment, though still conversational in tone. He usually dropped off in the middle of a sentence, as if George couldn’t bring himself to say more. There was never really much of anything about his life written down for Joe—not his wife’s name or his children when they appeared into the world, what he did for a living and the names of the friends he made both at that job and on the street where he now lived, a detail provided solely by return address carefully written in the lefthand corner of the envelope. Instead it was all glancing reference to what he got up to when he wasn’t sitting down, having a drink, penning a letter. 

George recognized it as a futile effort after that first year back passed without any response. Hard-headed, stubborn, _your dumb friend_ —he kept writing. He didn’t expect anything. That, he believed, was called generosity of spirit, to do something and not expect anything in return. 

Over time, the letters he wrote to him got a little longer. Confessional. It felt a lot like those nights when they’d find each other, seek each other out. Talk to each other. He missed it. He missed a lot of things and he didn’t know how to tell anyone about that, not even Joe and definitely not himself. But he tried. There were a lot of ways to say, _I miss you_. George should know: he invented some of them.

He would write the letters quickly, usually at the bottom of a glass or three of whiskey. Seated alone at his kitchen table, one lone light on, inside the house he bought, the house he paid the mortgage on each month. On the cold winter nights, he’d crack the window open, just for a little while. Just so he wouldn’t forget. There was never any risk of forgetting, but he did worry about that. He knew now from experience that there were a great many things a man could lose, both in a war and after. Each letter written and unanswered was an acknowledgement of that fear, of loss. He understood that, dimly. He understood most things dimly, as if viewed from a great distance. From behind a wall of heavy falling snow.

_January 7, 1952_

_Lieb,_

_Have I got a whopper for you: guess which sonabitch is coming out to your neck of the woods this spring? If you didn’t guess me, you’re a bigger idiot than I remember and feel free to disregard this letter._

_It’s a long story and I’ll tell it good if I ever see you, but I’ll be in San Francisco the last week of April. If you don’t wish to see me, no hard feelings. If you are in fact dead, I will happily meet with your ghost. I am not above that and I always did want to know if ghosts are real. And if you yourself would like to meet up, grab a drink, eat a steak or an entire cow, that would be mighty fine as well. If so, it’s a big city and you’ll have to let me know where to find you. I have this (very quiet, silent, you really might actually be dead) address of yours and that’s it. Don’t make me play detective. I’m no good at it._

_Happy New Year, and maybe I’ll be seeing you soon._

_George_

_February 2, 1952_

_George,_

_Of course I’m alive. I don’t like writing letters is all._

_You can find me at my work. The address is as follows:_

George stood outside a cab garage in San Francisco. He didn’t need to take the letter out of his pocket, he’d memorized the address back when he was on the other side of the country, but he did anyway. That letter was the first word he’d gotten out of Joe after six years, and read and reread, it was still terse as anything. Nearly formal, like he might’ve been writing to his goddamn state senator. It didn’t read like his voice, and when he first got it, George found himself disappointed. It made me the memory of him feel that much further away, that much more prone to fear of invention. But the handwriting was familiar, spiky and messy and barely legible. The address was clear enough. And correct, by the looks of it.

George re-pocketed the letter and he entered the garage. 

Met by a handful of men, clearly on break, disinterested without pay. George cleared his throat. “Hi there, any one of you fellas might be able to tell me where I can find a Joseph Liebgott?” He got a lot of ugly glares for his trouble. 

A newspaper rustled as one of the men peered over top it towards George. “Look, pal, we don’t want problems or nothing.”

“What? I’m a friend. Of his. Or, I was. We served together. I was,” and he paused. George cast an arm out in what he thought passed as supplication, adopted the voice of a bad Italian mobster, regretted both right quick. “I was in the area.”

“He’s out doing pick-ups,” one of the other drivers said. He didn’t bother to look up from his sandwich.

“Liebgott served, huh?” the man with the newspaper said, interest piqued, even if only slightly. He shook his head. “Ain’t never said boo ‘bout it.”

“He must got more interesting things to talk about is all.”

He shrugged like he didn’t think that was it. “You fellas see a lot of action?”

It had been years and George still had yet to figure out how to answer the question in any way that gave any sort of glimpse into the kind of action they saw. Instead, he shrugged too. “We saw enough,” he said, good-natured but closed. “Is he gonna be back any time this decade, or am I barking up the wrong tree here?”

“Shift just started. Gonna be awhile.”

“Yeah. Right.” George bounced on the balls of his feet, his hands jammed into his trouser pockets. He made a snap decision; he snatched up a fare slip. He pulled a pen from his pocket and he scribbled quickly, the name of his hotel, his last name only, signed sloppily, wide loops in his L and his Z. “See he gets this? I’m out at the Fairmont. Don’t look at me like that—I ain’t paying for it.”

“You say so, Rockefeller.”

“Yeah, yeah.” He slipped his pen back into his pocket. “So, which one of you guys’s gonna give me a lift back, or are you all sleeping on the job?”

_January 3, 1946_

_Joe,_

_May auld acquaintance be forgot and et cetera et cetera so on and so forth and auld lang syne! Hope your travels west were easy, partner, though both the good lord and the good George Luz know, nothing’s ever easy with you (except, of course, for the company you serve and keep—how’s that for some word play for you?)_

_Been back for a hot minute now, Ma was thrilled I was home for Christmas. I ate enough fit to burst. Nothing’s really changed here, but nothing’s much the same neither. Been working with my pops for a bit, some odd jobs, and I’m told I got to figure out a life for myself. No kidding, I say. While I been scrounging the classifieds and the like, I got to thinking about you. I wondered if you’d made it back behind the wheel of your cab yet and then I started thinking about what that first drive must’ve felt like. On a less friendly man, you might’ve called it jealousy. On me, I couldn’t tell you, but it was enough for me to write you._

_Happy New Year, Joe, and hope to hear from you soon._

_~~Your~~ _

_George_

“Would you look at that—by the grace of god, he lives and breathes.”

It was the first thing he said to Joe in six years. Joe showed up at the hotel bar that evening, in between the immediate afterwork crowd and the late-nighters. George had camped out at that bar for the better part of his the day, waiting.

“Through no fault of my own, I might add. How you doing, George?”

George got to his feet. “Can’t complain.”

Joe stood before him, obvious and almost painfully uncertain as to how to greet George. He settled on reaching out and pounding George on the shoulder, which George turned into a quick embrace. 

Joe took a seat at the bar beside him. George decided that he looked the same, his face still sharp-featured, knife-cut and more than a little mean. He was older, but so was George. There were lines now around Joe’s mouth as it moved, indecisive as the rest of him, flickering between a grin and something firmer.  Joe was still lean, but no longer scrawny. George himself had softened with the comforts of home, no longer running and scrapping and living on Army rations.

“Glad to know you got all my correspondence,” George said.

Joe laughed, low and quiet. He lifted his eyebrows as he looked at George. “You know, you’re as goddamn wordy on the page as you are in person.”

“They say I got myself the gift of gab.” George straightened his posture just a little. He held tight to the highball glass in front of him. “Well, it’s good to know you didn’t forget about your old buddy George. I had my doubts.”

There was that flicker again. George wanted to blame his steady decline these past hours towards drunk, but he kept feeling what he could only call a sweep of wrongness as he looked at Joe. As if someone had placed tracing paper over the features and the man that he had known so well and drawn this instead. The same, but different. Him, but changed. It was unnatural. It wasn’t fair. 

“Huh. No. I think about,” but then Joe stopped shorted and George was met with a rush of familiarity. That was the Joe he remembered—terrified of incriminating himself, belying anything he might think or want for fear that those same things could later hurt him. For just a moment, George could picture a small bedroom in France, warmly lit and red. Joe looked down at his hands against the wood grain of the bar. Those were familiar, too. “I liked them,” he finally said but he was still looking at his hands. “Your letters. I like getting them.”

“Yeah, you liked them so much you made me drag myself across the country to get a reply out of you.”

Joe’s mouth tightened. George took the opportunity to really look at him, face in profile as it was. His hair was mussed, his neck still long and skinny as it dipped down into the open collar of his shirt. He still kept a cigarette tucked behind his left ear. It was such an odd relief to see it, as if the pressure in his chest was released, just a little. Familiar and strange, to see it, to see him here, in such a civilized place. It occurred to George that neither of them belonged in this hotel bar or this hotel at all. That maybe what they went through went ahead and replaced vital parts of themselves with something dark and inexplicable. That maybe they didn’t belong with people other than each other.

George pushed the thought away, he ordered drinks when the barman finally came their way.

Joe watched as the bartender placed their drinks down before them. It wasn’t until he had left them that he spoke. “So what the hell you even doing out here? A man might start getting ideas.”

“Start’s the right word. Buddy, you never had one idea in all the time I knew you.”

“I had plenty.”

George lifted his glass up to his mouth to disguise the amused twist of his mouth. The banter came back easy enough; he’d missed it. “Well, if you can believe it, you’re looking at the brother of the East Coast Salesman of the Year. And what did he get for it? They sent him out west, and he took me along with him.”

“What’s he selling?”

“Life insurance. You need any?”

“I think I’m good.”

George’s older brother worked as an insurance salesman, and as a prize for winning East Coast Salesman of the Year, he got to go visit the west coast office—in San Francisco. “I remember you saying you always wanted to get out there. Well, here’s your chance.” It wasn’t the sort of offer any man would pass up, so George leapt for it. He hadn’t traveled since he returned home from Europe at the end of ’45. He figured what the hell. He told Joe as much, tried to make it sound as flippant as he wanted to believe himself to be. He knew he failed by the smirk blossoming on Joe’s face.

“And while your brother’s working hard, salesman of the year and all—”

“Only on the east coast, gotta keep him humble.”

“—yeah, only on the east coast—what’ve you been doing?”

“Handyman.” George didn’t have much to say about that, so he returned to his brother, talking with pride about him instead of himself—how happy his parents were, not too shabby for the old Luz clan, actual success and actual money, the American goddamn dream.

Joe didn’t say anything for a beat, even as his jaw twitched and his lips quirked upward. “You coulda been a salesman. Salesman of the fucking year—that mouth on you, you could sell snow to an eskimo.”

“Eh, you haven’t met my brother.” George paused. “And it’s only on the east coast.”

“Your brother serve?”

George shook his head. “Nah. 4-F.” He pointed to the right side of his head. “Deaf in one ear.”

Liebgott laughed, loud and genuine. “Makes sense. How the hell else was he gonna live with you?” Liebgott didn’t say anything more for a moment. “You never mentioned that, y’know, in all that time. Hell, I don’t remember you ever talking about your family.”

“Can’t remember you doing much of it either.”

“I don’t like my family, there’s the difference.”

George grinned. His mouth faltered a little. “I don’t know. Guess I just didn’t want them there with me, if that makes any kind of sense. I thought about them, I mean, of course I did, but the less…it was just easier—who was I to make it any more goddamn difficult for myself?”

If Liebgott agreed, he didn’t say so. “Anyone else in your family serve?”

“Nope. By the time my younger brother came of age, the war was over, lucky chump.” He didn’t ask any of the same questions of Joe. It oddly felt as if it didn’t matter. The way they knew each other, the way they related to each other, it was independent of all these other factors that constituted a life on the other side of the war. “The guys at your work, they didn’t know.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t talk much about it.” Joe leaned to the side in his chair, eyes hooded and gaze fixed on George. "I bet you do.”

There wasn’t any real recrimination in it, just a statement of fact. George shrugged all the same. “Sometimes,” a statement of half-truth. George didn’t want to talk about his wife, he didn't want to tell him what she said, fresh home from a night out with his brothers and their wives, the couples who lived on either side of them, the both of them tipsy and therefore dangerous. “I don’t like how you talk about it,” that was what she said. “How I talk about what?” He could remember raising his voice, and that was another thing she didn’t like. He didn’t care to tally all the things she liked about him against what she didn’t for fear the math would betray him, wouldn’t balance in his favor. He loved her, and she loved him, and that was enough math for him. “Oh god, George,” she said, “it’s always the war. Always that goddamn war, and the boys, and so-and-so did this, and can you believe, so-and-so did that.” Of course he had gone and married a woman with an aptitude for impressions. “It’s morbid,” she snapped, and maybe it was. “It’s like you miss it or something.” And, yeah. Maybe he did.

“You said you’re married?” George met his eye, as if Joe could read his fucking mind.

George exhaled, resisted the urge to fidget. “Yeah. Yup. That I am. You?”

Liebgott shrugged. “Tried it on, didn’t take. Kids?” He asked that too like the answer didn’t really matter. George guessed that maybe it didn’t. It was the same way the war worked, in that regard. There was no life beyond their marching orders, beyond maneuvers. Beyond the space they occupied together and the space they would come to take to occupy next, come hell or high water or all the spilled blood and guts you never knew the human body held until you saw it broke open beside you.

“Got a couple of those running around.” He didn’t return the question.

“You happy?” George exhaled a small laugh.

“Yeah, fuck it, maybe.”

“Well, would you look at you. Christ.”

“Yeah. Would you look at you, too. It’s good to see you, it really is.” Some of the humor had evaporated from his voice, and George didn’t trust himself. He worried that some of that same earnestness bled through the page in all those letters he sent him. But, then. Did it fucking matter? Maybe Joe never wrote him back, but here he was. He came to see him. “You’re a hard man to find, y’know.”

“Do you ever think that, maybe, when a man’s difficult to find it’s ‘cause he don’t wanna be found?”

George mulled that over. “You coulda just stopped at ‘do you ever think.’”

“Don’t I know it.”

George’s mouth cracked into a soft smile and he released a small breath of laughter. He turned his empty glass over in the palm of his hand. “The guys still ask about you.”

“They ask you about me?”

“They ask anybody from Easy about you. If anyone’s heard shit from you.” Guarnere, in particular. He organized the reunions, took keeping the band together like an actual job ordained by a higher power. He called George up one weekend, and he asked him if he’d heard anything from Liebgott. George told him the truth—no, he hadn’t—but omitted the detail that he had sent several letters. He knew better than to say that, even if he couldn’t articulate why exactly. It felt like it was too transparent a detail about him. Exceedingly personal. A man got that back after he was discharged: a personal life. Guarnere had said, “Ain’t that the damnedest. I even called Web up, you believe that? Asked if he’d heard anything, but he hasn’t got boo out of the guy either.” 

“You’d think Guarnere was class president way he treats Easy, trying to plan the next goddamn pep rally,” George said now.

Joe didn’t say anything at first, just sat there quiet. “Yeah, well. I don’t know how to belong in two places at once.” It was a painfully astute thing for him to say so George didn’t add anything. “You tell Wild Bill you were coming out here to see me?”

George considered his glass in front of him. Wished there was more in it. “I did not,” he said slowly, drawing each word out. He lifted his head, looked over at Joe again. “Didn’t wanna get his hopes up only to get out here and find myself stood up like a girl on prom night.”

“Yeah, I thought about leaving you on your lonesome.” 

“Your better angels intervene?”

Joe started to laugh. “Really appreciate you thinking I still got those.”

“True. You never did.” George began to relax. It was as if when Joe had walked in here they were little more than muted versions of themselves, but here they were now, coming alive, slowly, the more they talked. All the same, even as it was happening, George couldn’t remember how they used to do this. How he used to be. How he used to be this way with anyone. What he always wanted to tell his wife but knew he never would, that he would never be that cruel to her, was that he was never going to know and he was never going to be known by anyone other than these guys. He was going to spend the rest of his life missing both the best and the worst time of his life. 

Joe threw back the rest of his drink. “So you gonna ask me up to your room or you gonna make me do all the dirty work here?”

“If you’re offering.”

Joe leaned in towards him. His elbow brushed against his arm and his mouth was there and wet from the gin and his eyes burned as they always had, as if only he was in on a secret that doubled as some great cosmic joke. It all came back. Of course it did. 

“Take me up to your fucking room, George.”

“By all means. Follow me.”

They last saw each other at New York Harbor. The day was cold and they were jostled by their fellow infantrymen, swallowed up by the excitement of stepping foot again on American soil. Because you couldn’t say good-bye, not a real one, not like that, George assumed that meant they weren’t. Not really. 

“So. I’ll be seeing you?” He meant it as more of a parting line, a joke even, not a question. There was no denying his inflection at the end of the sentence. He was asking.

Joe raised his hand to George’s shoulder and he gave him a brief squeeze. “You take care of yourself, George.”

“Are you happy?”

The room was nicer than anywhere they had been together in Europe. They were side-by-side in bed, packed tight against each other. George could feel the press of Joe's ribs against his body, sweat-slick and pleasantly used, that gnawing hunger inside himself finally slaked. He had waited for that same awkwardness, that uncertainty, that had stalked them downstairs at the bar to find them here. It never did. Instead, they were hurried, desperate with each other. As if they were still a thousand miles away and several years and there was no guarantee there would be a tomorrow to wake up to. As if was true what George had suspected in his darker and his drunker moments: the war had followed him home like a stray dog.

George had forgotten that sex could feel like this. That wasn’t true; he hadn’t forgotten. There were plenty of things he wished he could forget, and maybe this was one of them, but they all just rattled around in his head. Left him unmoored and all too often more than a little lost. But when Joe got him down on that soft mattress, his weight pressed down on top of him, he knew. It all came back. His body had not forgotten.

“Are you happy, George?” Joe asked again.

George exhaled, the sound too soft and too foreign to be a laugh. Something sadder. Damaged. Something you lifted up and dropped because it was too heavy. A man out an airplane, lifted and dropped like that. Even when you landed right, it left a mark. Everything left its mark. He was still trying to square himself with that.

He knew what the next day would bring, and by extension of that, knew what the following days would bring with them, too. That was living. What they fought for. A small house in Providence and a toolbox with his name on it, a cabby’s license and maybe the very limited space that was this bed and this room but nowhere else. He’d get on a plane tomorrow. He would not jump but he would go home. 

“I’m alive.” If he tried, he could almost smell the plaster dust, the mud, the metallic stink of blood. He didn’t try.

“Yeah,” Joe said, because he was too. He understood.

That was supposed to be the part that counted.

George pulled the door open. He stepped inside, kicked the snow off his boots. The VFW Hall in Providence—over the years it had become a home away from home. It was December, cold but not yet the sort of cold that managed to still strike fear in his chest. Or a cough, for that matter. Snow had just started to come down, the big flakes, wet, stuck and streaked across his windshield. If he stayed long enough, he’d most like have to dig out. He figured he’d worry about that, like most things, later. When the time required it of him and not a moment before. 

He got himself a beer at the bar and he took a seat. He knew most of the fellas there that night, said his hellos and how you doings. Traded a few jokes with some of the boys; “You ever hear the one about the guy? Yeah, he goes to war. And then guess what? He somehow’s gotta come _back_.” He was introduced to one he didn’t. He’d been with the 101st, primarily worked at First Battalion for Five-Oh-Deuce as a translator. 

“So you know some German then?” George said.

The guy nodded, said neither _yes_ nor _ja_. George didn’t say anything either for a good while. He drank his beer. The VFW had decked the halls in ornate if not gaudy fashion. Tinsel, big bulbed lights, Santas with cotton ball beards, Judy Garland on the radio singing the saddest goddamn Christmas song ever recorded. Someone had jumped the gun, already strung up a banner for the coming New Year— _WELCOME 1952!_ , it read in reflective silver. 

With each year that passed, each step further away from that war, George was learning something. There was a pull, a tide to history. It always rolled back in; you couldn’t stop it. It’d find you. He understood now with a violent certainty what a flat gray sky would always mean to him. The smudge of light off the bulbs on the tilting tree in the corner of the bar. The smell of snow on chilled air crisp enough to bite. Men gone before their time, the men left to pick up the pieces, build a future amidst the debris, _if the fates allow_. 

George finally turned back to the man seated next to him. 

“Y’know, I got a question I’m hoping you might be able to answer. Been bothering me for some time now.” He waited for the man to nod again, and he did. Outside, the snow continued to fall. “What the hell does _lieb_ mean?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AND THAT'S A WRAP!
> 
> As a note, everything here re: their lives post-war is invented and not drawn from either of their real lives (and in fact probably definitely contradicted by their actual lives) but instead extrapolated from the final scene of the series.
> 
> I want to thank any and all of you for joining me on this (very) unexpected journey. This has been such a fun fandom to revisit and this has been a (very random) blast to write.
> 
> I'm [widespindriftgaze](https://widespindriftgaze.tumblr.com) @ tumblr; feel free to come join me!


End file.
